Perfumes: the guide

476 Pages·2008·2.18 MB·English

by  Luca Turin, Tania Sanchez

Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
INTRODUCTION TO PERFUME CRITICISM
FEMININE FRAGRANCE
MASCULINE FRAGRANCE
CHEMISTRY AND ART
ANSWERS TO FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
PERFUME REVIEWS
GLOSSARY OF MATERIALS AND TERMS
TOP TEN LISTS
INDEX OF STAR RATINGS
VIKING
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WC2R 0RL, England First published in 2008 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © Luca Turin, 2008
All rights reserved Illustrations by Diana Sanchez
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Turin, Luca.
Perfumes : the guide / Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez.
p. cm.
Includes index.
eISBN : 978-0-670-01865-9
’1. Perfumes—Miscellanea. I. Sanchez, Tania. II. Title.
TP983.T869 2008
668’.54—dc22 2007042786
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For the perfumers
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I owe a heavy debt of gratitude to both Evan Izer and Victoria “Vikapedia”
Frolova, whose erudition, generosity, kindness, and tiny glass vials of odorous
substances have been gifts beyond value. I also thank the Makeup Alley
fragrance board: we are family. I relied heavily on Robin Krug’s excellent blog,
Now Smell This (nowsmellthis.blogharbor.com), for dependable info on the
unstoppable tide. Much of our work would have been near impossible without
Michael Edwards’s Fragrances of the World database. Thanks to Aedes and
LuckyScent for connecting me with elusive brands, to Chandler Burr for telling
fragrance PR people to get used to it, and to my sister Diana for creating exactly
the illustrations I wanted. Heartfelt thanks to my friends Ann Gugliotti, Patti
Ferrara, Laurie Harbour, Laura Ann Frankstone, and Achinta McDaniel for their
steady optimism and support. A million thanks to Tom and Elaine Colchie, the
best agents and friends a writer could ask for, and to all at Viking, especially
Rick Kot, who might know more about fragrance than we do. And thank you
most of all to Luca, for the rash invitation. TS
Over the years, many kind people asked me why I didn’t write a second perfume
guide, this time in English. My answer was always that I would, in due course.
Due course came along in the shape of Tania Sanchez, the first person I met who
could halve the task and more than double the quality. It also took the form of
Michael Reid Hunter, who asked his father, Alastair Reid, whether he knew an
agent, which is how we met Tom and Elaine Colchie and through them Kathryn
Court and her team of believers at Viking. The rest was plain sailing, helped by
the tireless, generous scholarship of Michael Edwards and the patient kindness
of great perfumers: my friends Calice Becker, Chris Sheldrake, and others I only
spoke to and would love to meet one day. Daniel Weber at NZZ Folio, probably
the world’s best editor, and Alke von Kruszynski at Park Avenue made me
believe I could, with help, pull it off. To all of you, and to all the firms big and
small who sent us the stuff, heartfelt thanks. LT
INTRODUCTION TO PERFUME CRITICISM
How to Connect Your Nose to Your Brain by Tania Sanchez
One late-spring afternoon, Luca and I headed to the perfume floor at Harrods,
where he was leading a small group on tour—his kids’ classmates’ parents who
had paid for the privilege as a fund-raising event for the school—no perfume
fanatics, just ordinary people indulging curiosity. We guided them through
Lauder, Guerlain, Hermès, Chanel, Caron, and so on; explained what they were
smelling; and watched them react. Some they loved and some they hated;
sometimes they strained to match words to sensation, and sometimes they
snapped to attention when the ideas locked exactly into place. At one point, Luca
sprayed the first fragrance from Comme des Garçons and explained it had started
a trend for transparent orientals. A tall, well-dressed, intelligent man with a
forecasting job in telecommunications protested, “How can a smell be in
fashion?” As far as our questioner was concerned, perfume was too immaterial
to fall into patterns and categories. How could something as shapeless and
evanescent as a smell have a history and a culture?
The question is understandable for many reasons, not least that, until modern
perfumery began at the end of the nineteenth century, advances were limited to
mixtures of natural extractions of local materials, with the occasional incursion
of exotic resins and plants imported from distant lands at high prices. For
centuries, the greatest perfumery idea was probably the eau de cologne.
Throughout the twentieth century, however, perfumery flourished as one of the
great popular arts, following a flowering of ideas in the industrial age, in the
same way that fashion, music, and design flourished, contributing more and
more beauty to the everyday life of the everyday person. Yet perfume is probably
the least understood and least appreciated of the arts. After all, it’s girl stuff.
Even food and wine, closely related to perfume since flavor is mostly smell,
have the status of arts worth documenting, preserving, and understanding,
earning whole newspaper sections and walls in the bookstore, bringing fame and
TV time to their star practitioners.
Meanwhile, perfumers mostly toil in anonymous darkness, and the little
writing there is on their creations falls largely into two unreadable genres:
breathless purple descriptions by ad writers or poker-faced pseudoscience from
aromatherapists. An example of the former, cribbed from the blog Now Smell
This on November 17, 2007: “Humiecki and Graef asked Laudamiel to create a
perfume that captures the state of ‘how men cry’—eruptive and sensual. Pictures
from Slavic culture, as well as how they deal with melancholia and happiness
served as inspiration [sic]. The result is a perfume that combines raw eruption,
sensual strength, melancholic warmth and deep mysticism.” An example of the
latter, from a January 2000 article in Psychology Today: “Aromatherapy seems
to foster deep relaxation, which has been shown to alter perceptions of pain.
Essential oils also affect the brain in the hippocampus, the seat of memory, and
in the amygdala, which governs emotions; inhaling oils helps us make pleasant
associations, easing tension.” Neither is likely to increase the culture of perfume.
Smell psychologists and the uncritical journalists who love them get a lot of
mileage out of calling smell the most primitive sense. (When I am queen of the
universe, the epithets “the most primitive sense” and “the most mysterious
sense” will be banned from all writing on smell.) But as with all of the work of
evolutionary psychologists, the conclusions that support our desires and
reinforce our prejudices are those of which we should be most wary. Skim the
shelves of any bookstore nonfiction section to see a large selection of fiction:
pop psychology books assuring us that, since we’re no better than the average
dog (never mind that dogs are much better than we think), all our behavior is
nothing but the basest animal instincts in different dress, that men will always be
peacocks in full strut looking to distribute their genetic material as widely as
possible, and that women will always be gregarious hens pecking at each other
to attract the attention of the alpha male. Psychologists seem particularly fixated
on sex as the engine that secretly drives our every choice and action. This point
of view never cost a psychologist his or her job or interfered with book sales,
and offers the irresistible premise that biology releases us from the responsibility
to make choices. Pop psychologists love smell. Smell is supposedly about sex
and deeply buried memory, a sense that bypasses the rational mind, thwarts all
efforts of language to describe it, and reaches sneaky neural wiring directly into
regions beyond thought—for example, forcing you to be sexually attracted to or
threatened by the perspiration of basketball players or generating forceful
hallucinations of childhood triggered by smells of floor wax. It’s the fondest
hope of every perfume firm that the psychologists should be right, and that