Turin Luca - The Perfumes The A-Z Guide

Table of Contents

Title 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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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. PerfumesMiscellanea. I. Sanchez, Tania. II. Title.

TP983.T869 2008

668.54dc22 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 Krugs 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 Edwardss 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 didnt 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 worlds 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 tourhis kids classmates parents who had paid for the privilege as a fund-raising

event for the schoolno perfume fanatics, just ordinary people indulging curiosity. We guided them

through Lauder, Guerlain, Herms, 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 Garons 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, its 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