Perfumes: The Guide
I've never thought about perfume very much. In fact, if I'm honest, I had formed the opinion that it was a scam to sell luxuriously packaged bottles designed to fill a present-shaped hole in the shopping bags of men and grown-up children. This probably stemmed from the moment in the mid-1990s when perfume started giving me a headache. The fragrances that I'd used before then, Beautiful by Estee Lauder* and Lancome's Tresor**, suddenly seemed insufferable and I gave up on perfume. A new book, , by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez has caused me to reconsider and once I've manage to shift the terrible cough I've had since tramping around in the rain at the Edinburgh Festival, I will repair to some boutique or other to give the artful mixing of molecules a second chance.
The first section of the book consists of short, zesty pieces about the chemistry of perfume, the characteristics of masculine and feminine scents and the reason why there has been little perfume criticism in the past. According to Tania Sanchez, the Internet has transformed discussions of perfume, crediting a lot of her education in perfume to "the twenty-four-hour-a-day pajama party that is ". Where magazines had feared to alienate advertisers through criticism, the Web both brought discontinued and rare fragrances within reach and allowed people to say what they wanted.
Turin and Sanchez are enjoyably gossipy and opinionated guides, and they do a good job of explaining why it is worth reading about something as ephemeral as perfume, without mythologizing it. Mentions of heart notes, fougeres and drydown are spiced with amusing descriptions - such as this comment on the hugely successful Curious***, sold under the star of Britney Spears: "a bland, inoffensive magnolia-and-cherries thing resembling children's cough mixture". The prose occasionally smells a little on the ripe side, such as this comment on Miss Sixty****: "Ideal if you intend to be a miss at sixty", but it's easy to forgive such infelicities when the authors so obviously love their subject matter. They also don't seem to be influenced by whether the perfume is expensive, cheap or associated with a celebrity: putting the boot into Britney's Curious, but describing her Believe as "a well-put-together tart-and-sweet sherbet accord". Almost 1,500 perfumes are reviewed, accompanied with a one- or two-word description and a star rating - useful when dealing with this volume of material.
Even if I find that my resistance to the pleasure of perfume cannot be dispelled by this brief education, I've still enjoyed looking through the descriptions of the scents worn by friends and family - in the way you might glance at a personality test. And it's been amusing to have some of my assumptions challenged. Five stars for Tommy Girl by Tommy Hilfiger! Who would have guessed?
* (classic rose, four stars)
** (powdery rose, four stars)
*** (syrupy floral, one star)
**** (cheap candy, one star)
(sweet fruity, three stars)
* (tea floral, five stars)
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