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."

An example of the latter, from a January 2000 article in Psychology Today:"Aromatherapy seems to foster deep relaxation, which has beenshown to alter perceptions of pain. Essential oils also affect the brainin the hippocampus, the seat of memory, and in the amygdala, whichgoverns 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 themget a lot of mileage out of calling smell the most primitive sense.(When I am queen of the universe, the epithets "the most primitivesense" and "the most mysterious sense" will be banned from allwriting on smell.) But as with all of the work of evolutionary psychologists,the conclusions that support our desires and reinforceour 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 betterthan the average dog (never mind that dogs are much better than wethink), all our behavior is nothing but the basest animal instincts indifferent dress, that men will always be peacocks in full strut lookingto distribute their genetic material as widely as possible, andthat women will always be gregarious hens pecking at each other toattract 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 premisethat biology releases us from the responsibility to make choices. Poppsychologists love smell. Smell is supposedly about sex and deeplyburied memory, a sense that bypasses the rational mind, thwarts allefforts of language to describe it, and reaches sneaky neural wiringdirectly into regions beyond thought—for example, forcing you tobe sexually attracted to or threatened by the perspiration of basketballplayers or generating forceful hallucinations of childhood triggeredby smells of floor wax. It's the fondest hope of every perfumefirm that the psychologists should be right, and that human beingsshould be sniffing each other to say hello and see who's been whereand with whom. Psychology is supposed to be a science, and sciencemakes profits predictable.

Unfortunately for the profits, perfume really is an art, not a science.Tocade is not a better fragrance than Dior Addict because it betterapproximates the mix of odors released by a fertile female. Tocadeis better than Dior Addict because it's more beautiful. The varieties ofbeauty in art are not irreducibly animal and ineffable. Somebody putsthese things together with skill and intention. Perfumes have ideas:there are surprising textures, moods, tensions, harmonies, juxtapositions.

Perfumes seem to come in various weights and sizes, to havedifferent personalities, to wear different clothes, to worship differentdeities. Some perfumes are facile and some are complicated; some arerepresentative, some abstract. Above all, some are better than others.All the same, perfume suffers several drawbacks as a subject ofserious study. First, nothing can be smelled without disappearing.You don't use up a picture by looking at it, but each time you uncorka perfume, the bit that evaporates is the bit you enjoy, and afteryou've smelled it, there's no getting it back into the bottle. Everyonewho has ever looked at the decreasing level of a beloved and discontinuedperfume knows the anguish of the finiteness of resources.Therefore, preservation and appreciation can seem incompatiblegoals.

Second, perfume changes over time in the bottle once exposedto air and light, so perfume can be a bit like those digital-rights–managed music formats that expire after you start listening to them.You can't enjoy the same bottle forever, in other words. Third, direct experience is the only experience. You can't reproduce smellsin books or digitize them. Fourth, the perfume industry, in a hoary,unbroken tradition of self-defeating behavior, has done everythingit can to avoid viewing its work as art. Perfume companies do notgenerally keep archives. They change formulas without telling customers.They discontinue their classics. They lie about contents.They hide the perfumers and art directors responsible. They shillshameless copies of great ideas and hope no one notices. They'veeven withdrawn advertising from magazines that criticized theirwork. Fifth, perfumes are lumped in with cosmetics and all the folderolthat accompanies them, and therefore hidden in the veil ofhope and lies that enshrouds all beauty products in jars. And sixth,we are not taught a vocabulary of perfume. Its materials are strange,save what we know from gardens and kitchen cupboards, so we findit difficult to name the different shades along a spectrum vastly morecomplicated and variegated than the colors in a Crayola box. As itis, the beginner struggles to pick out one or two characteristics ofa perfume. For instance, if we're told two perfumes are roses, butthey're clearly different, we often struggle to explain exactly how. Ittakes some getting used to.

In fact, until recently, talking intelligently about the art of perfumeseemed impossible. Then suddenly it seemed inevitable. Whatchanged? The obvious: the Internet. Online now you can read historicaland technical information, find discontinued or otherwiseelusive perfumes, order samples of raw materials to smell out ofcuriosity, and, most important, find communities of people clusteredaround this single obsession. Half of what I know I owe to thetwenty-four-hour-a-day pajama party that is the fragrance boardof Makeup Alley (makeupalley.com), whose members introducedme to fragrance brands I'd never heard of, fragrance categories thathelped me draw connections among vastly different things, and theidea of writing about fragrance at all. Online communities can criticizeperfume in a way that magazines have never dared: there's noadvertising to lose. The public can say without fear that, frankly, thisthing stinks, that thing was true love, this other thing is so-so. Perfumeblogs now seem to outnumber the sample vials around mydesk: there are men and women of intelligence sitting down everyday and thinking and writing about perfume.

In time, the perfume industry is going to get used to criticism.Look at wine, movies, music, books: open and fair critical discussionskeep the public interested. Would we go so often to the moviesif we couldn't talk about them, if we had no clue whether a filmmight be good or not? Criticism makes us feel more comfortableshelling out for a ticket and also helps encourage a constant interest,leading us to check listings every week and talk about them endlesslywith friends. The same goes for perfume: those who talk about itbuy more of it. The trouble is that the perfume industry hasn't yetfigured out the benefits of relaxing control. A prominent blogger Iknow once received an ominous message from the press contact for afragrance she had panned. They wanted her address so their lawyerscould get in touch. When a sleek luxury goods company unleashesits lawyers on a suburban mom for not liking their new fragrance,we know the world is changing. The age of trash perfumes, composedin a matter of months on the cheap and sold with celebrityfaces and outrageous claims, must at last be nearing an end. Onlyquality can win out. The perfume business will certainly fare betterin a world of genuine public love than it would in a world in whicheveryone dismisses its product as nonsense.

The fact is that this stuff is worth loving. As with the tawdriestpop melody, there is a base pleasure in perfume, in just aboutany perfume, even the cheapest and the most starved of ideas, thatis better than no perfume at all. It decorates the day. It makes youfeel as if the colors of the air have changed. It's a substitute for havingan orchestra follow you about playing the theme song of yourchoice. Think of what the functional fragrance industry calls themagic moment, when the smell of fabric softener billows out of yourdryer and you can't help but feel great. Perfume is wonderful. Andit's simply not true, as some people believe, that thinking about ourpleasures ruins them. For example, few things are as wonderful ashaving a great meal and talking about it afterward, and rememberingother great meals, and planning the next one.

We have found, in writing this book, that the same holds for perfume. All pleasureis connected, and the endless ride we take between disappointmentand satisfaction and back again is largely what keeps us interested inlife. What more is there to talk about?

Published with permission from "Perfume: The Guide," by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez. copyright 2008. Published by Viking Adult.