Luca Turin - Perfumes: the guide

Table of Contents

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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 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 cryeruptive 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.