Excerpt: 'Perfumes: The Guide'

April 16, 2008 — -- "Perfumes: The Guide" is the ultimate guide to the world of fragrance — a primer of scents and sensibility as well as an exhaustive listing of 1,500 perfumes, rated by authors Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez.

The book covers the four key categories of perfume, gives advice on how to choose the perfect fragrance for you, and more. Read an excerpt from the book below.

How to Connect Your Nose to Your Brain
by Tania Sanchez

One late spring afternoon, Luca and I headed to the perfumefloor at Harrods, where he was leading a small group ontour—his kids' classmates' parents who had paid for the privilegeas a fund-raising event for the school—no perfume fanatics, just ordinarypeople indulging curiosity. We guided them through Lauder,Guerlain, Hermès, Chanel, Caron, and so on; explained what theywere smelling; and watched them react. Some they loved and somethey hated; sometimes they strained to match words to sensation,and sometimes they snapped to attention when the ideas locked exactlyinto place.

At one point, Luca sprayed the first fragrance fromComme des Garçons and explained it had started a trend for transparentorientals. A tall, well-dressed, intelligent man with a forecastingjob in telecommunications protested, "How can a smell be infashion?" As far as our questioner was concerned, perfume was tooimmaterial to fall into patterns and categories. How could somethingas 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 localmaterials, with the occasional incursion of exotic resins and plantsimported from distant lands at high prices. For centuries, the greatestperfumery idea was probably the eau de cologne. Throughoutthe twentieth century, however, perfumery flourished as one of thegreat popular arts, following a flowering of ideas in the industrialage, in the same way that fashion, music, and design flourished,contributing more and more beauty to the everyday life of the everydayperson. Yet perfume is probably the least understood and leastappreciated of the arts. After all, it's girl stuff. Even food and wine,closely related to perfume since flavor is mostly smell, have the statusof arts worth documenting, preserving, and understanding, earningwhole newspaper sections and walls in the bookstore, bringing fameand TV time to their star practitioners.

Meanwhile, perfumers mostly toil in anonymous darkness, andthe little writing there is on their creations falls largely into two unreadablegenres: breathless purple descriptions by ad writers or pokerfacedpseudoscience from aromatherapists. An example of the former,cribbed from the blog Now Smell This on November 17, 2007: "Humieckiand Graef asked Laudamiel to create a perfume that capturesthe state of 'how men cry'—eruptive and sensual. Pictures from Slavicculture, as well as how they deal with melancholia and happinessserved as inspiration [sic]. The result is a perfume that combines raweruption, sensual strength, melancholic warmth and deep mysticism."