The Toiletries Trap—or is it a safe haven?

Arts and Crafts and the Status of Perfume

The status of perfume continues to be debated, but it seems that the reigning climate these days is inclining people to join the “perfume is art” camp. There are many possible sociological, economic, and psychological explanations for this phenomenon relating specifically to this moment in history, but the question whether perfumery is really an art may be but one iteration of an age-old dispute regarding the distinction—or lack thereof—between arts and crafts. Is an accomplished potter an artist or a craftsman? What about a gourmet chef?

Is a genuine object of art essentially useless, serving no mundane function? Does an artist whose medium is clay become a mere craftsman on the days when she produces bowls and mugs? Should what she does be judged by appeal to what other people may or may not do with her creations? If she drills holes in the bottom of her mugs, making it impossible to use them for the purpose for which they appear to be intended, then will this act—senseless to some—elevate her, the creator, to the status of artist? Or will she just be a bad (mad!) potter?

The genre fiction writer offers another useful example for reflection. Authors of detective and mystery, science fiction, and romance novels are producing books which fit into certain predelineated categories and which follow certain basic conventions. 

The readers of such works have a set of expectations which must be met in order for the work to succeed. A mystery novel without any suspense is a failure because being suspenseful is essential to being a good mystery novel. A romance novel with no hot and steamy scenes of love and betrayal would be a flop. A science fiction novel which made no reference to the current state of technology and possible future developments would crash like a rocket with a faulty O-ring.

The Toiletries Take

To many, indeed most, consumers, perfume is a toiletry. Perfumistas have been known to bristle at the suggestion that the object of their olfactory love might be anything less than the most exquisite work of art. Nonetheless, like it or not, perfume is regarded by many people as a toiletry because it is a consumable product just like soap, lotion, and toothpaste. 

Such products all serve functions and offer certain very specific benefits to the user.

People generally perfume themselves in order to smell good. Often the goal is to smell attractive to other people. Some wearers, at least judging by comments in fragrance community website forums, appear to care more about others' receptions of their perfume than they do about their own perceptions of their own scent. 

Whether those who perfume themselves care more about their own opinions' or the opinions of those with whom they come in contact while wearing perfume, they appear to be united in their commitment to the idea so often recited in perfume reviews, that Perfume should smell good. From this perspective, if a perfume does not smell good, then it is either a bad perfume, or it is not perfume at all because it is unwearable.

Bad poetry has its own name: doggerel. Bad perfume is sometimes referred to as swill or dreck. Bad food is slop, but food which cannot even in principle be consumed is really garbage in disguise. In this way, perfumery is obviously similar to cuisine. A meal, no matter how painstakingly prepared by a chef, must be edible, in the end. If it is utterly inedible, because it is repulsive or poisonous, then the chef has failed. Food should taste good, and perfume should smell good. Does this not imply that niche perfumery is completely analogous to haute cuisine? Blasphemy of all blasphemies...

Consumable Crafts

Unlike most other crafts, cooking and perfumery are united by the fact that the products of the craft are consumed. We might consider wine in the same group and place oenology on an equal footing with other crafts the ultimate objective of which is to produce consumable goods. The artisan may and often does aim to produce fine, excellent, beautiful, even transcendent goods, but they must, at the end of the day, be consumable all the same.

What I find especially interesting about these crafts is not just that the goods produced are consumed, it is that the goods must be consumed in order to be experienced. Perfume appreciation, like fine wine and cuisine appreciation involves destroying the very object of appreciation through an act of ingestion. There is no point to food which is not eaten or wine which sits in a cellar never to be imbibed. Similarly, perfume in a capped bottle may hold potential for appreciation, but it is not truly appreciated for what it is, the unique combination of notes which unfurl before the nose, until it is sprayed.

This is, in part, it seems to me, the basis for the claim sometimes made that large perfume collections are ridiculous. If the person who owns hundreds—or even thousands—of perfumes cannot even in principle wear them all, then is she really any different from the notorious hoarder, who amasses and clings to objects in a desperate attempt to create meaning from an otherwise meaningless existence?

Perhaps we can think about large perfume collections in a more charitable light. Perhaps what they reflect is a desire—widely shared by perfumistas today, or so it seems—that we should be able to have our perfume and sniff it too, so to speak. This would seem to be the guiding idea behind the Osmothèque, an institution established in order to preserve perfume which however, in reality, can only be experienced through its very annihilation.

My distinct impression is that most people, even sophisticated perfumistas, have not really thought through the very many different kinds of judgments which they make regarding perfumes. The term 'art' has been appropriated to express approval, without any real examination of what it could mean for perfumery to be an art. It is unclear in what aesthetic principles of judgment applicable to perfumery might consist. People appear to judge perfumes solely by appeal to their own idiosyncratic tastes. Are there principles of perfume criticism? No one has yet to make the case. We can of course use language in any way we like and, yes, we may express our approval of a perfume labeling it a masterpiece or a chef d'oeuvre. But that just seems to be code for: “I love it!”

Certain nagging contradictions need to be addressed, if we are to get to the bottom of this question, it seems to me. On the one hand, many perfumistas seem to want to exalt perfume to the status of an eternal, immortal art. Most notably, in his Untitled series, Chandler Burr has been exhorting people to smell perfume as an art object. A sentence from one of his introductory texts at OpenSky reads: For the first time, experience perfumes in a way that will allow — in fact encourage — you to rethink each scent by freeing you from all visual cues and marketing techniques.

Burr appears to be addressing the unwashed masses most of whom have never participated in the sorts of Mystery Scent Vial Trials which have been hosted by perfumistas for years now. But even people who sample perfumes from vials, independently of the bottles, have already been experiencing perfume as perfume, not as marketing hype. 

To be perfectly frank (quoi d'autre?), it is not at all clear to me what smelling perfume as a work of art is actually supposed to mean. Does smelling a perfume differ from smelling a perfume under the label objet d'art? In what might the allegedly distinct experiences inhere? Both would seem to involve ingesting molecules through the nose which transmit messages to the brain. How does calling a perfume a “work of art” change any of that?

Another problem with such an idea is that perfume is the only example of an alleged art which leaves no traces of itself behind having once been experienced. We must first purchase perfume for our personal consumption before we are able to appreciate it—whether as an objet d'art or something rather more mundane, to wit: a toiletry. Because it must be acquired and destroyed to be appreciated, perfume is essentially commodified.

Of Rules and Shopping Carts

Further evidence for the craft status of perfumery may be found in considering the complacent adherence by perfumers to the IFRA regulations restricting the use of certain materials. Perfumers appear, by and large, to be abiding by these regulations or guidelines. But since when did artists follow the rules? The attitude of perfumers themselves toward the IFRA, their willingness to line up in a row even as this severely restrains their own creative potential, suggests that perfumery is not really an art, at least not as practiced by the vast majority of professional perfumers today. Olfactory art is possible because any kind of art is possible, but perfumers do not, for the most part, seem to be engaged in that enterprise. Most of them are, instead, “noses for hire”.

Successful professional perfumers such as Alberto Morillas and Yann Vasnier secure contracts with a variety of different houses because they can be depended upon to create perfumes which consumers will wish to wear and, by extension, buy. Of course, the same is true, mutatis mutandis, for successful chefs. They are not hired by restaurants unless they have demonstrated their dependability at producing pleasing food which patrons will want to consume. The similarity of the vocation of successful perfumers and chefs suggests, then, that whatever one wishes to call what these professionals do, that label—art or craft—should apply to both cases.

It is worth underscoring here that the Untitled Series being “curated” by Chandler Burr is being carried out under the auspices of the social shopping site OpenSky. The scare quotes are intended. The word 'curated' has become fashionable of late and is now applied to any collection of just about any goods being offered up for sale. I recently received an advertisement from Henri Bendel touting the virtues of its “curated” gourmet snack collection!

The mission of OpenSky, like that of Henri Bendel, is clearly to get people to consume more and more random things as quickly as possible. Nothing else can be reasonably inferred from the frequency of their emails to me in an incessant campaign to get me to buy n'importe quoi, above all, whatever I may have been looking at most recently. If I only browse and do not buy something from OpenSky but make the mistake of placing some item in my cart (to avoid wasting time at the only shopping site I've seen which actually lacks a search button—at least as of today), then I am rewarded with stalking messages until such time as I either buy the item or purge it from my cart.

Once my cart is empty, then I am enticed to return to OpenSky to fill it with more random objects recommended by my “friends” Bobbie Flay, Ming Tsai, Chandler Burr, and anyone else whom I've “shopped with” before. Every so often I am sent a “free shipping day” message, and I also seem to be regularly rewarded for my reticence in closing out deals with “credits” of various amounts, which lately have ceased to be applicable to clearance items and now only apply to purchases of at least $50.

Perfume is a commodity, which Chandler Burr is attempting to sell at the same time that he wishes to exalt perfumery to the status of an art. Many perfumistas appear to have jumped on the Burr bandwagon—which is not to say that this whole movement was his own idea, for it was not—but they also want to consume the perfume paid for with their hard-earned cash. Even more striking, they want to have their perfume—as an art—while retaining the ability to consume it on the cheap, applying pricing standards appropriate to toiletries in deciding whether a perfume is worth its price tag or not.

Fine Art at Toiletries Prices? 
Wake Up and Smell the Chemical Soup!

In an earlier manifesto relating to this topic, PERFUME IS NOT MILK, I pointed out that perfume is an affordable luxury or self-indulgence to anyone well-off enough to dine out, drink wine, or to drive a car where that is manifestly not a necessity (as in a city with an excellent public transportation system). Following upon a feisty exchange with Kankuro (of Parfumo fame) over at Fragrantica, I would like to approach the economic question from another angle. My answer, you may rest assured, will remain the same—not because I am a dogmatist, but because my opinion has yet to change!

I have been struck recently by the importance of this question all the more as I have attempted to wrestle with the question of whether or not perfume is an art. As we have seen, there are good reasons for skepticism about the status of perfumery as one of the beaux arts, but I would like to consider what the likely consequences of a widespread affirmation of perfume as an art form would be. Specifically, what would the economic effect be?

As a preamble, let us consider again the somewhat alarming revelations of the Daily Finance article “Behind the Spritz,” in which the breakdown of the cost of a $100 MSRP bottle of perfume is displayed. On first read, it is mindboggling to discover that the perfume itself accounts for only 2% of the cost of an average massmarketed designer perfume. The article no doubt incensed many perfume lovers, confirming yet again in their mind that the price being asked for by houses is far too high.

I'd liked to dig a bit more deeply into this issue. First off, the assumption being made in the article and by anyone who is troubled by its revelations, is that the price of a good should be more or less the same as the combined price of its constituent components, plus perhaps a small profit margin to those who peddle the product. It seems like common sense.

Let us take a simple example. No one really thinks that a pizza should cost the sum of the cost of flour + yeast + tomatoes + cheese + oregano + olive oil + the heat needed to cook it. If that is what a pizza cost, its price would be something like $1. Add some sausage or anchovies, and maybe it would cost $2. Instead, pizzas cost ten times that much. Part of that price difference is due to the cost of labor to produce the pizza.

Somebody had to harvest the wheat to make flour, to mix with yeast and water, to knead and punch dough, to roll or throw it out to form a disc, to adorn the dough and to convey it into an oven for it to bake. Someone else had to grow the tomatoes, chop them up, transform them into pizza sauce. Yet another chain of persons was needed to milk the cow, to make the cheese, to catch the anchovies, etc. In fact, the costs involved in each of these separate chains to the production of the various components of a pizza is already embedded in the cost of the end product of that chain. So if wheat flour costs $1 for a pound, that price already includes the cost of producing it, along with the profits enjoyed by the various persons employed within the chain.

If one were to produce all of the components of a pizza from scratch—don't try this at home!—that would be another matter altogether and an exercise which would swiftly demonstrate the virtue of the divisions of labor which have arisen in the modern world. Once one reflects upon the chain of labor involved in the production of a pizza, its price no longer seems exorbitant at all. Restaurants buy their basic ingredients in bulk at a significantly lower cost than the volumes typically used by individual consumers. Consequently, to make a pizza at home, which would require first purchasing all of the separate ingredients, would probably cost quite a bit more than the finished pizza parlor product itself—even without the (paltry) wages paid to the restaurant workers.

Turning now to the case of perfume, the consternation over the cost breakdown of a bottle of perfume arises because the aspects of the perfume which we truly value account for the smallest portion of its price. Everything else, much of it extraneous—or so it seems—costs more. Even the bottle, at an average of $6, costs three times more than the juice inside, at $2. On its face, then, the case of perfume seems rather different than that of pizza. True, some pizza parlors do advertise, but many do not—or at least not in the way that Chanel and Dior do—and we are confident that most of the money which we pay for a pizza covers the cost of the pizza itself, not its box!

The concerns raised in “Behind the Spritz” are precisely why people have decried the price of perfume, and often complain about it in their reviews. But what, my fragrant friends, is the cost of anything—and why? Why does a professional baseball player earn millions of dollars a year for donning a costume, hitting a fast-moving ball with a stick, and running around a parallelogram as fast as he can? And why in the world do people pay hundreds of dollars for their families to be able to sit in the stands and watch him do that? For heaven's sake, they could be spending that money on some very fine perfume!

In some cases, a vast disparity arises because the objects in question have an emergent value, which far transcends the value of their material components. Consider a painting by any famous dead artist. Obviously, the cost of the canvas + paint + labor does not add up to the millions of dollars which such a work may command at Sotheby's.

When perfume reviewers complain that they would never pay so much for this, they mean a type of perfume which can be had for a much lower price. We perfumistas demand a lot of the perfumes said to be worthy of our wallet share. We want beautiful and original compositions which wear well and have excellent longevity and which will not spoil before we reach the bottom of the bottle. Many people also want all of this on the cheap. They seem truly to expect original masterpiece perfumes at knock-off prices.

I myself believe that the originality requirement has been grossly overstated and thoughtlessly applied in the case of perfume. Perhaps this is in part a result of the rampant charges of plagiarism made through The Holey [sic] Book. Many reviews by perfumistas seem keen to dismiss as redundant perfumes whose sole demerit is to have reminded the wearer of another perfume created earlier—and often with a lower price tag. To call a perfume a “clone” or a “knock-off” is to allege a conscious act of plagiarism on the part of the perfumer who created it.

I do not understand nor have I ever understood, first, why people derive such a sense of smug satisfaction through leveling such (fully unsubstantiated!) charges, nor, second, why this slander/libel has not been recognized for what it is by nearly anyone—save sherapop—to date. Instead, this condemnation of the efforts of hard-working, well-meaning perfumers continues in a spate unlikely to abate until The Holey [sic] Book is so badly out of date that people stop turning to it at all.

The strident tone and fervor with which this perfume is denounced as a clone of that one, far from establishing the validity of the charge, diminishes the reviewer, not the perfumer, in my mind. How many Beyond Paradise clones exist? Let us count the number of entries in which this manifestly preposterous assertion is made about perfumes which really smell nothing like Beyond Paradise at all! (Marc Jacobs Essence? Really?)

A Modest Proposal

The irony of the knock-off and clone complaints by perfumistas is that often some of the very same people complain from the left side of their mouth that perfume is too expensive and, from the right side of their mouth, that perfume has not been adequately recognized for the art that it is. In reality, the reason why perfume remains affordable, and is by far the least expensive among all luxury products, is precisely and only because the vast majority of consumers regard it as a lowly toiletry.

We may wish to duly acknowledge the greatness of transcendent perfumes, but we'll be much better off if we keep the artistic quality of our cherished elixirs a closely guarded secret among fragrant friends! When was the last time that an art collector picked up a masterpiece for $100 or $200 or even $300? If the word gets out that niche perfume is really art, then the market price will skyrocket and all middle class perfumistas will suffer as a result.

This argument against exalting perfumery as an art is diaphanously pragmatic and self-serving. But I wonder whether those who insist on characterizing perfumers as artists and perfumery as an art have ever thought this matter through and entertained what the consequences would be, were they to succeed in exalting perfume above the (other) toiletries. I recently read a review in which the author expressed “deep regret” at having shelled out all of $15 for several perfume samples from a house whose wares were not to her liking. Need I say more?

When was the last time, O Gently Scented Reader, that you picked up a painting at Sotheby's—or even drained a bottle of vintage wine? My Fragrant Friends, I humbly enjoin you to abandon your vain and self-sabotaging insistence on labeling perfumery as one of the arts, for we will only be able to continue to have our perfume and sniff it too so long as the secret doesn't get out!

Are there Principles of Perfume Criticism? Or are judgments about perfumes all and only a matter of subjective taste?

Many perfumistas assume that perfumery is obviously an art and that only philistines continue to regard perfume as a toiletry on the same level as mouthwash and deodorant. We know the names of the perfumers who created our favorite elixirs, and we regard some of them in a manner befitting of great artists.

It may seem undeniable that perfumery is an art, once one begins to reflect upon and understand what is involved in conceiving of and producing a perfume. At first, there is nothing but a bunch of random ingredients, and then suddenly there is a masterpiece. Who but an artist could effect such a magnificent change, equivalent to a grand creation act?

Jean-Claude Elléna

Some perfumers, including Jean-Claude Elléna, have published reflections on their own work in book form. Others, including Andy Tauer, offer through their blog entries an intimate glimpse into the life of a perfumer. The way these perfumers regard their own vocation seems very similar if not identical to the perspective of artists in other realms on their own work.

Andy Tauer

I for one am fully prepared to label such perfumers as artists. Do I think that all perfumers are artists? Frankly, no, I do not. I believe that many of the people who produce fragrances under the auspices of huge corporations are industrial chemists who accept assignments to do as their employer decrees, creating the sort of scents which the company would like its products to bear, and permitting the employer to critique and tweak those scents. All of this is done within the bounds of a strict budget fully determined by the profit margin expected from launching and marketing a certain product in a certain way to a certain group of consumers.

There have been industrial chemists working in such a capacity for precisely so long as there have been scented products: laundry detergent, furniture polish, bathroom cleaning products, and also such items as lotions, shampoo and hair conditioner, diapers and baby wipes. 

All of these products have scents and those scents are produced by chemists, who can be regarded as perfumers, in some tenuous sense, but not in the way in which Jean-Claude Elléna and Andy Tauer and all other independent perfumers who run their own houses seem to be dedicated to the production of beautiful perfumes.

Creative directors such as Serge Lutens and Keiko Mecheri work in close collaboration with professional perfumers to produce compositions which realize the vision and reflect the values of the creative director. No less than are salaried chemists working for large corporations, such contracted perfumers are the subordinate employees of their creative director when they are hired for a project, whether a single perfume or an entire series of launches.

I am certainly prepared to assert that figures such as Serge Lutens and Keiko Mecheri are artists whose vision is elaborated through their enlistment of people technically adept at producing perfumes. Are the people who work with such creative directors also artists? The line become finer and finer it seems to me and depends ultimately upon the perfumer's own role in a particular case. If the perfumer is informing the director's aesthetic choices in a significant way, then perhaps he or she should be regarded as a co-creator in the perfume production process and, therefore, also an artist. Christopher Sheldrake would be one example.

Are “creative directors” such as Britney Spears and Sarah Jessica Parker and Paris Hilton and Queen Latifah and Mariah Carey and Jennifer Aniston and Kate Moss and Heidi Klum and Halle Berry and Madonna—and all of the other many celebrities who have launched perfumes or even entire series of perfumes bearing their name—also artists in the sense in which Serge Lutens and Keiko Mecheri seem to be?

This seems dubious to me, in large part because the finished products tend to fit into certain market molds and are probably more reflective of fashions and trends than of the “creative director's” vision. Certainly the perfumes produced in these people's names have met with their approval, in some sense, but whether or not they are actively engaged in the process, and to what extent, will differ from case to case. I myself do not consider any performing artist to be an “olfactory artist” simply for having launched a perfume.

One reason for denying that celebrities are artists when it comes to perfumery is that their intention in launching fragrances seems diaphanously to be not only to make money, but also to further extend and promote their own fame. This primary motive distinguishes celebrity creative directors from those such as Serge Lutens and Keiko Mecheri, whose intention appears to be to produce excellent perfume—in addition, of course, to making money.

Anyone who looks anywhere—whether among the niche and independent, or the mainstream designer and celebrity houses—for pure, non-mercenary intentions in today's perfume industry will be disappointed, it seems to me. The distinction between artists, on the one hand, and businesspeople and hacks, on the other, cannot be that the former have no interest in earning money from what they do. Artists, too, need to support themselves, so wishing to make money cannot be the deciding factor. In addition, entrepreneurs such as Laurice Rahmé of Bond no 9 appear to enjoy not only creating excellent perfumes but also running successful businesses.

What is missing in the case of the non-artists, those who could just as easily be running a supermarket chain as a perfume house, is a priority given to producing a certain kind of perfume. It seems clear to me that many launches are crassly mercenary, as are many reformulations. Those perfumes are a cause for cynicism about the status of perfumery as an art, at least as it is practiced in many contexts.

Companies such as Bath & Body Works and Victoria's Secret offer useful examples. Such “houses”, if you will, regularly generate new perfumes and nearly immediately discontinue them, to the disappointment of the consumers who have come to appreciate them. Consider the Parfums Intimes launch by Victoria's Secret of a series of quite decent fragrances in 2009.

These perfumes were among the best—as far as I've sniffed—ever produced by Victoria's Secret. They were evidently a market flop, however, and were abruptly discontinued not too long after they had been launched—I believe that it was less than two years. Why were these perfumes discontinued? In all likelihood because Victoria's Secret customers are not, generally speaking, concerned so much with having a refined perfumic quality in their fragrances. Many of them, not being perfumistas, were probably not prepared to pay the MSRP of the Parfums Intimes, which was initially $59 for 50ml. The price was lowered somewhat after the initial launch, and two further members of the series, more in line with the fruity-floral tastes of the typical Victoria's Secret customer, were added to the original four launches, but these measures appear to have been too little, too late.

Many Victoria's Secret customers are perfectly happy with the Secret Garden series, the non-prestige eaux de toilette which carry a regular retail price of $12 for 30ml. During sale periods, which occur many times each year, these (needless to say highly synthetic) fragrances can be had for less than $5 a bottle.

Despite the fact that the Parfums Intimes perfumes were really quite good, relative to the Victoria's Secret standard line—and even their other prestige fragrances, such as the Dream Angels series—they were discontinued. Success on the market is the only criterion for perfume survival, and this is why such a company seems to me to be primarily a business, one which happens to offer fragrances, among many other products, above all, in their case, lingerie. For Victoria's Secret, perfume is but an accessory to their primary output: bras and underwear. Accessories are optional and can be changed or eliminated as soon as they prove not to be profit-worthy.

The perfumers who work for companies such as Victoria's Secret and Bath & Body Works seem to me to be for the most part industrial chemists, although on occasion a famous nose is contracted for a special launch. Whether a particular perfumer is an artist or perhaps more of a chemist or technician will depend upon that person's approach and orientation. Andy Tauer has a Ph.D. In chemistry, but that has not stopped him from being an artist. The question becomes: what are the criteria to apply in order to decide who is right and who is wrong when not everyone unanimously agrees about the value of a particular perfumer's output?

Is Perfumery an Art Like the Others?

In a recent comment here at the salon regarding the status of perfumery at the end of a post on the pre-Socratic philosophers Anaximander and Anaximenes, Christos (of Memory of Scent) posed the following challenge to those who would exalt perfumery as an art:

As far as art, I really do not think that everything can be turned into art. To turn back to the Greeks, they had defined what art is and of course new media have added the moving image in the form of cinema, video, performance to the list. But olfaction has always been there since the beginning of the human civilization. Where is the theory behind it to make it a real art? Of course there are levels of creation and not all perfumers are made equal but I need to be convinced that a common language to express and critique perfume can be created before I believe it is true art.

---Christos (Memory of Scent), July 30, 2012 

The more I reflect upon these incisive words, the more I recognize that there really does seem to be a problem here. Perfume critics and reviewers all seem to have very declarative and forceful opinions about the perfumes which they sniff, but are they ever really offering any genuine aesthetic criticism? Are they doing anything more than expressing their personal likes and dislikes in the manner in which one may express one's personal taste by praising or denouncing anchovies or or a certain brand of black licorice?

My skepticism about this question was further piqued by Chandler Burr's repeated allusion to Alberto Morillas as an “olfactory artist” during the revelation of the identity of S01E02, the second episode of the first Untitled Series, which turned out to be Thierry Mugler's Cologne. I correctly guessed the perfumer's identity in a post at Open Sky in mid-July 2012, and the name of the perfume in a post at Fragrantica, but my reasons for guessing Morillas were certainly not Burr's reason for substituting the locution 'olfactory artist' where one might normally use the term 'perfumer'.

Burr is evidently keen to underscore the status of perfumery as an art to people who might not yet already believe, but I wonder whether he thought through the implications of referring to Morillas repeatedly as an “olfactory artist” during the discussion with Katie Puckrick about S01E02. By saying that Morillas is an “olfactory artist,” not just a perfumer, is Burr not implying that only some perfumers are olfactory artists? In other words, by making this distinction, Burr appears to be claiming that all olfactory artists are perfumers, but some perfumers are not olfactory artists.

The curious thing about this distinction is that Morillas is precisely the sort of perfumer whom one might consider to be an industry hack, someone who has worked for dozens of different companies on many different projects and within the bounds of tight budget constraints imposed upon the projects and according to the specifications of the client. Certainly this sounds much more like a professional craftsman or technician than an artist, at least how we understand that word today.

In the contemporary world, fine artists are typically distinguished from the sorts of people who work for companies in ways intended to increase their profits. So the people who write jingles for television commercials are not generally regarded as poets—at least not for this particular type of textual output. The people who design ads for the weekly grocery circular are not usually regarded as visual artists—though they may of course be in the privacy of their own homes or in other spheres. The people who write music for movies may or may not be regarded as great composers—depending upon what else they do and also the quality of the movies for which they produce scores.

On analogy, the perfumers who compose for Bvlgari, Calvin Klein, Carolina Herrera, Cartier, Giorgio Armani, Kenzo, Thierry Mugler, et al., are clearly helping those companies to fill in their perfume portfolio, so to speak. The paramount goal in hiring a perfumer is to make money, not to produce works of art.

A recent article in Daily Finance, "Behind the Spritz," shows the somewhat alarming breakdown of the cost of a mainstream bottle of perfume with a MSRP of $100. Without delving into the details here, suffice it to say that the bulk of the money is poured into the management and presentation of the product, with only a pittance poured into the actual bottle (which, at $6, typically costs three times more than the juice inside, averaging $2!). All of the effort put into distribution, presentation, and sales is made in order to get the bottle onto as many people's vanity trays as possible, what is naturally facilitated through the use of advertisements which seduce consumers into believing that this is the perfume to use.

What is curious about the identification of Alberto Morillas as an olfactory artist rather than a commissioned perfumer is that he is famous precisely for having created perfumes which have earned billions of dollars for companies in the perfume industry. But does this not suggest that Morillas is closer to a best-selling author than he is to a writer of timeless literary works? Best-selling authors abound at any moment in time—there is, after all, always a best seller list, so someone must be on it! A big part of these writers' success is due to the aggressive promotion of their works by publishers. In reality, only a tiny fraction of even wildly popular and financially successful authors achieve posthumous renown. In the case of perfumery, posthumous renown would seem to be virtually impossible, because perfume, like its creator, eventually evaporates away.

A further problem with the “Alberto Morillas has earned the perfume industry billions of dollars” rationale for labeling him an “olfactory artist” is that, by that criterion, if Britney Spears keeps on her current fragrance launch trajectory, she, too, will one day be hailed as an “olfactory artist”!

Now, one could say that Chandler Burr is simply attempting to shore up his credentials as the curator of olfactory art at the Museum of Art and Design (in New York), which is a cynical but not unrealistic view of the matter. Another tack to take would be to say that in fact all perfumers are olfactory artists, but this seems quite dubious to me, for the reasons given above. It seems quite clear that some persons working in the perfume industry and directly engaged in the creation of new fragrances are consciously catering to and even helping companies to shape certain market niches, in part through the use of marketing surveys and studies, among other techniques.

There are obviously people creating sweet laundry and shampoo and conditioner scents, all of which is a part of what might be termed the “personal hygiene turn” currently under way in perfumery. I wonder whether the house of Clean was not in some ways visionary, if not revolutionary, in predicting what sorts of scents people would be ready to buy in the aftermath of the post-Angel wave of cloying sweet patchouli perfumes. There is only so much sweet patchouli and skank that people are willing to tolerate: at some point they just want to smell clean.

Now, we can call anything we like by any name we choose. But the point Christos made so insightfully is that there is a distinction between an art which is actually susceptible of criticism and one which is not. This leads us directly to the core question: are there or can there be principles of perfume criticism, or are judgments of perfumes all and only a matter of taste?

What might principles of perfume criticism look like?

Here are a few candidates which one might consider from a random selection of entries in The Holey[sic] Book (misleadingly published under the title Perfumes: The A-Z Guide), by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez:

• Longevity and Projection

• Weirdness

• Accuracy in naming

• Price

• Ability to evoke the memory of some place visited or thing experienced by Turin during some period of his life

As regular visitors to the salon de parfum are fully aware, I am of the opinion that the negative reviews in The Holey[sic] Book are, in a phrase: 

solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short 

Overeducated readers will immediately recognize that I have indeed invoked, and not without reason, Thomas Hobbes' famous phrase for describing life in the state of nature, that is, before the establishment of civil society.

Thomas Hobbes, author of Leviathan

Many—in fact, most—of the negative “reviews” in The Holey[sic] Book are essentially outbursts devoid of any propositional content, so it's not even possible to agree or disagree with the authors. One can only grunt in response—whether in satisfaction or out of exasperation.

Turin and Sanchez certainly have strong opinions, and, like trash talk television pundits, they are not afraid to express them. However, I do not believe that their texts reflect anything even approaching principles of aesthetic criticism. Why not? you may ask. Because their very own criteria change from review to review. This would seem to imply that their judgments are based not on principles but personal taste and loyalties.

So, for example, longevity and projection are good, if the perfume is already liked by the authors. Longevity and projection are bad, if the perfume is disliked. Longevity and projection, therefore, cannot be criteria for distinguishing between good and bad perfumes. (Compare the reviews of Guerlain Insolence edp [5 stars] and Keiko Mecheri Loukhoum [1 star] to see this.)

Again, some perfumes are blasted for claiming to be what they are not. In other cases, such inaccuracy is taken in stride, because the authors already happen to like what they sniff. Truth in naming is therefore not a criterion. (Compare the reviews of Ambra di Venezia [4 stars] and Balmain Ambre Gris [2 stars] to see this.)

Some perfumes are dismissed as substandard for their synthetic materials; others are hailed as masterpieces for the same. Glorious “abstract” florals become “skeletal” when they figure in a perfume disliked by the authors. (Compare the reviews of Esteé Lauder Beyond Paradise [5 stars] and Bond no 9 Fashion Avenue [2 stars] to see this.)

Candyfloss appears at times to be a bad thing, but in perfumes praised by the authors, such as By Kilian Love, created by Calice Becker, suddenly candyfloss is a good thing. (Compare the reviews of Vera Wang Princess [1 star] and By Kilian Love [4 stars] to see this.)

But even having been created by a perfumer praised by the authors themselves as “great” cannot save a perfume which they happen to hate. Dominique Ropion is said in some places to be a great perfumer, yet he created perfumes upon which vicious invective is heaped, above all: Givenchy Amarige and Lalique Le Parfum, each of which amazingly garners one star.

Again, the “great” Alberto Morillas created Estée Lauder Pleasures, considered a masterpiece by the authors, but also Versace Bright Crystal, which garners one star and is denounced as a “nasty floral” and “hideously screechy.” Those four words, in fact, exhaust the full content of the review of this perfume by the “great” Alberto Morillas. 



Bvlgari Blv Notte, also by Morillas, is criticized by Turin thus:

incompletely worked out, as if the perfumer had hurried to the deadline and submitted a pile of Post-its instead of a manuscript.

Of Carolina Herrera 212, yet another Morillas creation, Sanchez writes (and this is the entirety of the "review"):

harsh floral. Like getting lemon juice in a paper cut.

Being a “great” perfumer clearly does not mean, according to the authors of The Holey[sic] Book, that one creates great perfumes. Another example: the “great” Mark Buxton is the explanation for the four-star rating of low-brow juice factory perfume Salvador Dali Laguna. Unfortunately, he was somehow “throttled” to produce the two-star Linari perfume Angelo di Fiume, which, according to Turin, “has little to say and takes ages saying it.”

Even the perfumes of Buxton's own eponymous house are dismissed as two-star mediocrity. But it's his house, for heaven's sake! If this implies (as it seems to) that Buxton is both the perfumer and the creative director, then how could the “great” perfumer make such aesthetic mistakes?

Sophia Grojsman, also repeatedly identified as a great perfumer, somehow managed to produce the one-star disaster Estée Lauder Spellbound, denounced in these genteel terms: “Powerfully cloying and nauseating. Trails for miles. Frightens horses. Gets worse.” The two-word mnemonic which they confer upon this perfume is “medicated treacle.”

If Grojsman is one of the greatest living perfumers (which I do believe to be the case), then how did she manage to produce such a horrid perfume according to the authors of The Holey[sic] Book? That is the question, my fragrant friends.

The identification of so many cases of great perfumers producing allegedly nightmarish perfumes raises two intertwined and rather vexing problems:

• Should we believe the reviewers or the perfumers when they come into radical conflict with one another about the quality of a perfume? Clearly the perfumers do not regard themselves as having produced dreck and swill. Clearly they do not regard their own creations as “hilariously bad” or “unconscionably hideous.” If the authors' opinions diverge radically from the perfumer's own—say, in a case such as Mona di Orio (may she rest in peace), whom should we, the readers, believe?

• Why, moreover, should we believe Turin and Sanchez when they say anything? If they are right that the perfumers whom they proclaim to be great are truly great, then how could they produce such awful perfumes? And if they are wrong in their identification of great perfumers, then might they not also be wrong in their judgment of perfumes?

I would like to press this argument a bit further to make absolutely clear precisely what it is that I am saying.

First, there is no sense in which Turin and Sanchez have more expertise about perfume than do perfumers themselves. Strikingly, I recall that somewhere in The Holey[sic] Book, Turin even confesses to having been a failure as a creative director at some point in his personal history of perfume.

Second, there is no sense in which the authors can be said have more passion for perfume than people who have dedicated their very lives to its creation.

Therefore, since knowledge of and enthusiasm for perfumery are the only alleged qualifications of the authors, there is no reason to prioritize their opinions above those of the perfumers whose creations they vilify.

Alas, human beings are like sheep, who from time immemorial have been following the lead of whoever steps forward with a megaphone and yells louder than everyone else. This is how and why the opinions of Turin and Sanchez have reverberated and echoed throughout the world wide web as insecure acolytes parrot their words in an effort to show that, yes, they agree with “the experts”. Sadly, many reviewers have also adopted their snarky, boorish style, mistaking nastiness for incisive critique.

The Question of Credentials and Credibility

The question of credentials was taken up recently in an excellent piece by Bryan Ross at From Pyrgos. Again, the crux of the issue can be summed up in a single question: Why should we believe that what Turin and Sanchez have to say about a given perfume has any objective validity whatsoever?

As I read through The Holey[sic] Book, with little knowledge about either author, I occasionally bumped into remarks which piqued my interest about who they were and what they had done to become world renowned perfume experts. Consider these words written by Sanchez:

in her review of Ellie D Ellie:

Sometimes even the professional reviewer is baffled by too much information.

in her review of Bond no 9 Fashion Avenue:

I'm always sure that some passionate botanist will phone me up on the subject of one of these skeletal florals one day and howl, 'You moron, it's obviously linden,' and my career will end, or something like that.

I often disagree with her most basic judgments about perfumes and believe that some of her reviews contain factual errors (Bond no 9 Little Italy is marred by a big dose of civet???), but when I read the above, self-referential remarks, which clearly indicate that Sanchez is a perfume reviewer with a “career” at stake, I immediately googled her name to find out where she had been gainfully employed as a perfume writer before hooking up with Turin. Was she perhaps a staff reviewer for the Los Angeles Times? Who knew?

In fact, I was unable to locate a single piece of published writing by Ms. Sanchez pre-dating The Holey[sic] Book or any evidence whatsoever that her “career” ever had anything to do with perfume. Although she is sometimes referred to by groupies (in forum threads at various sites) as a “journalist”, I have also been unable to determine which news service or paper she ever worked for—if any—as I could not locate a single by-line for her anywhere.

I imagine that in centuries past, people got away with these sorts of shenanigans far more easily. Having once shamelessly promoted one's self through the use of patently false claims, perhaps no one could complain so long as the marketing campaign had achieved its aim, to catapult the liar to fame.

Without delving into the question of the morality of duplicity and deception, in the age of the internet, publishing the above sorts of misleading—if not flatly false—statements is highly imprudent. The fact is that, as information has become more public, it has also become widely accessible. People who are writers have publications. “Professional perfume reviewers” have been paid to write perfume reviews. If those supposed publications cannot be located anywhere, then they never existed.

Here is an excerpt from a definition in Webster's Third International Unabridged Dictionary:

fraud = an instance of an act of trickery or deceit, especially when involving misrepresentation... a person who is not what he pretends to be

Turning now to Turin, he appears to have attempted unsuccessfully to resurrect someone else's vibrational theory of olfaction. Okay, fine. What does that have to do with aesthetic judgment? Remarkably, Turin himself owns that his nose is “average.” So why in the world should anyone care what he thinks of any perfume? Even if it should turn out to be the case that his pet theory of olfaction ends up being vindicated—against all probability, it seems—this would not have any bearing whatsoever on his status of as an aesthetic critic.

One might wonder whether the credential situation is any better for Chandler Burr, actually. He became famous in the perfume world in part by writing, ironically enough, a book about Luca Turin! The story of a frustrated scientist's obsession with and desperate quest to win a Nobel Prize? Really? Perhaps The Emperor of Scent will succeed in elucidating the source and full extent of Turin's megalomania, but I must say that, although it is on my reading list (I picked up a copy from Amazon for $2), it's not very high up in the queue.

We find ourselves in a situation here, my fragrant friends, where the “experts” are appointing themselves and decreeing who “olfactory artists” are and which perfumes are masterpieces and which are disasters. But what, exactly, are the criteria being used to make these pronouncements? The answer, I'm afraid, is that in each and every case, the criteria are no more and no less than the subjective tastes of those making the judgments, their alleged qualifications being the sheer gumption to don the emperor's new (nonexistent) robes!

What if “The Experts” Disagree?

I was delighted to learn that Chandler Burr had selected Prada Infusion d'Iris as the first perfume for the Untitled series, S01E01. Why? Because I hoped that Burr might thus be able to help to mend some of the damage undoubtedly done to Daniela Andrier's name by the caustic condemnation in The Holey[sic] Book of the entire perfumic output of the house of Prada. (Honestly, if I were an attorney, the slander/libel of perfumers throughout The Holey[sic] Book would be a class action suit waiting to happen.)

But here's the problem, for the question at hand: the few people (essentially two, if we simply admit what by now seems obvious, that Tania is no more and no less than Luca's rib) who have put themselves forth as aesthetic experts in perfumery disagree on the most fundamental question: whether a given perfume, in this case, Prada Infusion d'Iris is any good at all! Let us be clear: Burr and Turin do not disagree about why this perfume is good or bad. They disagree about whether it is good or bad!

"No!"

"Yes!"

Principles or Taste?

Here are the “principles” which I was able to glean from The Holey[sic] Book: Turin and Sanchez like the smell of rubber, sweaty musk, and peaches. They do not care very much for roses. Rather than the golden mean or a refined subtle quality (as found in the creations of Keiko Mecheri), the authors prefer louder, more aggressive and extreme compositional styles (as are exemplified by some of the perfumes of the house of Lush). They seem to be easily bored and would rather smell like sneakers than amber. They harbor a deep-seated resentment toward perfumers who charge prices which they regard as exorbitant (are they really unaware that PERFUME IS NOT MILK?), and they are more interested in originality of composition than they are in the quality of materials.

This is how a low-brow Parlux juice factory fragrance such as Jessica Simpson Fancy can garner three stars and Salvador Dali Laguna four stars while high-quality perfumes produced by Mona di Orio or Hermès—along with many niche houses which use only the finest materials—receive only one or two stars. The niche perfumes rejected by the authors as disasters often have broad followings among perfumistas who regard them as great.

The above gleaned “principles” are not principles of art criticism. They are predilections and preferences. They are statements of the authors' highly subjective tastes, no more and no less. If someone were to read all of my reviews, he would learn that my personal “principles” include a priority toward high-quality materials, complex development, and good longevity and sillage. I appreciate subtlety and eschew histrionic excess. I am much less interested than are Turin and Sanchez in who supposedly first came up with the idea that a certain combination of notes would work well. Frankly, I and many other perfume users could not care less who got there first.

I have a penchant for ambrette, violet, labdanum, benzoin, and roses, especially in oriental compositions. I dislike rubber, plastic fruits, heavy cumin, asafoetida, and sweaty musk. I would much rather smell like amber than sneakers. Another of my preferences—arbitrary though it may seem to some—is to avoid fragrances boasting BHT among their ingredients. In addition, because I appear to have a chemical incompatibility with Alberto Morillas, whom I affectionately refer to as “Chemical Albie,” I no longer blind buy any perfume created by him. Does this mean that he is not an olfactory artist? No, it means that he is not the perfumer for me. I and people who share my perfumic values wish to smell beautiful, well-made perfumes which do not assault our central nervous system and do not degenerate over the course of a wear into some sort of noxious form of chemical waste.

We all have our criteria for determining how to dispense with our perfume wallet share, and those criteria explain why we favor the works of this house or that, and we gravitate toward some perfumers while eschewing others. But are these criteria ever anything more than an expression of personal taste? That is the question, my fragrant friends.

I am fully prepared to be converted, if someone out there can step forward and steer me toward whatever the principles of perfume criticism are supposed to be. To this point, however, I have to say that I'm with Christos: in thousands of years of perfume use, no principles have ever emerged. Why should they now, in the twenty-first century?






Can We Talk? About Perfume