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

The Question of the Osmothèque

Human beings have been perfuming themselves in one way or another for thousands of years. Yet still today, in the twenty-first century, perfumery has not been widely accepted by most people as a fine art. The best explanation for this neglect and the exclusion of perfumery from the history of the fine arts more generally is undoubtedly the sheer ephemerality of perfume.

Here today; gone tomorrow is a slogan which applies nowhere better than in the case of perfume. Even the names of what were said once to be classic perfumes are applied today to entirely new perfumes as a marketing strategy, thus effectively undermining the very possibility of perfumery's subsumption under the more general heading of the exalted and immortal beaux arts.

In the Big Black Bechstein in the Middle of the Room, I attempted (with limited success) to suggest that perfume is closer to music than it is to the other arts, in that it is intrinsically nonrepresentational in nature. I also find, although I have yet to develop this idea in writing, that perfume and music are similar to one another in terms of our experience of them, as each flows to us in an undulating stream of consciousness.

Just as it is impossible to attend equally to each and every note of a complex piece of music such as a fugue or symphony, it is impossible to attend equally to each and every note of a complex perfume as it unfurls throughout the course of its development. What we catch are snatches of the works, which is one of the reasons why they are so rich and can be experienced over and over again without ever risking boredom.

Setting to one side ontological issues and the psychology of music and perfume perception, and looking at the objects of perception instead, it becomes clear that there is a fundamental difference between the two cases. Nothing that any human being does today will ever change the basic fact that J.S. Bach's Goldberg Variations are a masterpiece. Pianists may interpret the work in various ways, and we may or may not like those interpretations (I myself never liked Glenn Gould's grunts, may he rest in peace), but the work remains the same. In perfume, in contrast, the works said to be or to have been great eventually evaporate—quite literally—from the face of the earth.

Small wonder, then, that perfumers, along with their art, have not only been relegated to the margins of history, but their names have been inscribed in invisible ink. People have been perfuming themselves for thousands of years, but how many perfumers' names from more than a century ago does anyone know? We know that the old houses are old. Creed was established in 1760, Guerlain in 1828, and quite a cluster of names appeared on the scene in the early twentieth century: Chanel, Coty, Houbigant, et al. Lately the number of houses and perfumes has been increasing at a dizzying rate, chronicled admirably by Michael Edwards in his compendium Fragrances of the World (2012). But will any of these houses or perfumes be able to carve a permanent notch onto the tablet of human history?

Certainly in the small circles in which perfumers and perfumistas travel, much attention is paid to the originality and creativity of splendid perfumes, with credit given where credit is due to the otherwise unsung heroes of this art. Perfumers' names are explicitly associated with the perfumes of their creation by those “in the know,” but in the larger reality of which perfume collection (and obsession) represents only a minuscule subculture, for the vast majority of the consumers of perfumes, the name of the creator is completely unknown. They buy a bottle of perfume, which comes in a box, and generally speaking (with rare exceptions such as the house of Frédéric Malle) nowhere on either the bottle or the box is the perfumer's name anywhere to be found. This is the first clue that perfumery is more of a business than it is an art.

Houses, not perfumers, are credited when a consumer appreciates their wares. Thus Chanel is well-known even by the unwashed masses as a great creator of perfumes in part because they have produced the likes of Coco, Allure, Coco Mademoiselle, and above all Chanel no 5, but mostly because these have been made into household names by ubiquitous, relentless, mass cultural marketing campaigns.

How many people actually know that these perfumes were the works of  Jacques Polge and Ernest Beaux? I would surmise very few, even among self-styled perfumistas who regard themselves as more sophisticated than the average consumer. The truth is that there is no need to know the names of perfumers, and people concern themselves primarily with information relevant to their lives. If someone already knows that Chanel no 5 is and always will be her signature scent, then she may have neither the need nor the desire to find out who the perfumer responsible for its existence is. The question may never even arise in her mind. Her quest is over. She needs to know nothing more about her favorite perfume than where it can be found and purchased. She may even believe (erroneously) that the perfume was composed by Gabriel Chanel herself, just as many people appear to credit designers such as Marc Jacobs and Thierry Mugler with the perfumes bearing their name on the label.

Others, who have more of an eclectic approach to perfuming themselves may well wish to find out who created one of their favorite perfumes in order to be able to seek out others by the same nose. After a while, however, it may become clear that knowing the name will not necessarily be much help in finding other equally beloved perfumes, because every single creation of every single perfumer is unique and manifests a variety of influences beyond the sheer identity of the perfumer, including his or her budget on a particular project, the specifications of the client company, etc. Consider some of the more and less famous works by Maurice Roucel.

Every perfumer well known among the members of fragrance communities has produced one or more duds. Of course, the precise identity of the “duds” varies from person to person, depending above all on their tastes...

Is Amarige abhorrent? Or is it a masterpiece? While perfumistas may have strong opinions about their likes and dislikes, there does not seem to be any real consensus about which of the perfumes of Dominique Ropion are the masterpieces and which are the duds. It's fascinating actually, that so many people can agree that Dominique Ropion is a great perfumer, while vehemently disagreeing over the specific perfumes which validate that claim.

But, again, ask most any person you encounter on the street whether they know who Dominique Ropion is, and you will find that they do not. Some may confuse him with a vague media-generated image of Dominique de Villepin around the time when U.S. congressmen were pouring French wine down the gutters of Washington D.C. and eating “freedom fries”. In all likelihood, most people will frankly confess that they do not know who Dominique Ropion is and have never to their recollection even heard the name.

Unsung Heroes: Film Directors and Perfumers

In some ways, the situation of the perfumer is not unlike that of the film director, who often gets little if any credit for the product of his labor. Instead, most moviegoers attribute the greatness of a film to its stars, though in reality they have little to do with the nature of the artwork, serving only to interpret the lines written by the screenwriter and placed into a visual context by the director. There are of course sophisticated film lovers who are very familiar with the oeuvres of many different directors, but when ordinary people go to the cinema, they are not drawn by the director's name but by the movie stars.

Every rule has its exceptions, and I'd surmise that many of the people who go to see or rent a film by Martin Scorsese or Woody Allen or Stanley Kubrick (may he rest in peace) are doing so for the director, not for whoever the stars of a particular film by any of these iconic directors might be.

The ultimate exception to the rule may be Alfred Hitchcock, whose name became a household word through the massive exposure to him afforded to ordinary people through his many years on television as the host of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. In any case, the proportion of savvy movie viewers is likely to be as small as the proportion of savvy perfume users, it seems to me.

Perfumers are in some ways much worse off than film makers, however, because they lose all control over what is done with the perfumes of their creation once they become the property of a house. Reformulation is nothing if not the perversion by someone else of an artist's creation. The reasons for undertaking reformulation appear to be primarily economic, but there may be other considerations as well, including the desire on the part of a house's management team to leave their mark on or shape the quality of their offerings. I touched upon some of these topics in my earlier Reflections on Reformulation, but my point here is that the same thing does not generally speaking happen to the work of film directors.

A film is a film, and it stays that film for all time. Some people have protested the colorization of classic black and white films as a perversion of the original work, and reformulation may seem to be the same sort of thing. One significant difference is that the original black and white film upon which a recolorized version is based continues to exist and is not itself destroyed by the production of another version of the film. Not so in the case of perfume, where reformulations typically supplant the original perfume, usurping its name.

Consider Bernard Chant's Cabochard. A perfume bearing this name, still produced by Parfums Grès (pictured at right), has undergone significant change as a result of reformulation. It is said that Bernard Chant is a great perfumer. It is also said that he created Cabochard. But the vast majority of people who are familiar with this perfume today have only smelled the reformulation. And my hunch is that most of the people who refer to “the great Bernard Chant” have not smelled very many of his original perfumes. We accept on hearsay that he was great because he created perfumes which are said to have been great, though some of them are no longer produced while others have been drastically reformulated.

What is also interesting, however, in contrast to the case of film, is that, in the case of perfume, it is generally accepted as perfectly permissible to do the artistic equivalent of mangling a film and destroying the original. True, people may and do lament the reformulation of their formerly beloved perfume, but they do not, it seems, generally conceive of the injury as one committed against the perfumer but rather against the consumer. It would not be possible, I think, for a perfumer to initiate a successful civil lawsuit against a house for ruining his creation because the property in question belongs to the house.

This is a second clue that perfume is not regarded as a bona fide art in modern culture more generally, no matter how we perfumistas may wish to view things. The only perfumers who retain complete creative control over their works are those who also run their own houses. Perfumers such as Andy Tauer of Tauer Perfumes, for example, are at once the nose and the chair of their own company, and this ensures complete unanimity when it comes time to make tough decisions about discontinuations or reformulations.

I imagine that Andy Tauer, the artist, never proposes to himself, as CEO, to reformulate one of his own perfumes. His wearing of both of these hats simultaneously ensures that his works will not be degraded or destroyed through reformulation. He may of course for a variety of reasons decide to discontinue a perfume or, what is almost the same, to produce limited edition perfumes which literally cannot be reproduced beyond the original batch.

With mass market and designer perfumes, it seems that even sophisticated perfumistas are initially drawn to perfumes by the house label, and then only later do they learn who the creator of the perfume was. This may be in part simply because perfumers often work for many different houses, and there is no simple or obvious way to track the career trajectory of a given perfumer. He may work for L'Artisan Parfumeur and Van Cleef & Arpels, and found The Different Company before taking up permanent residence chez Hermès.

In fact, that appears to be precisely what Jean-Claude Ellena did—among many other things. Most everyone now knowledgeable about perfume is aware that nearly everything coming out of Hermès is the work of Ellena, just as everything coming out of Caron these days is the work of Richard Fraysse, and Thierry Wasser is the house perfumer for Guerlain. But in view of the vague and sketchy history of perfume up to now, all of this really adds up to the proverbial fifteen minutes of fame, in the grand scheme of things, again, given the ephemeral nature of perfume.

Can the Osmothèque Legitimate Perfumery as an Art?

As some consumers have become more sophisticated about perfume, thanks in large part to online fragrance community websites such as Parfumo.net and Fragrantica.com, they seem to have contributed to the general feeling among practitioners in the industry that perfume deserves to be recognized as le huitième art. Enter L'Osmothèque, inaugurated in 1990 and currently directed by Patricia Nicolai of Parfums de Nicolai. According to the Osmothèque website:

Premier conservatoire de parfums de l'histoire, elle préserve ces créations si vulnérables et si précieuses de l’usure du temps, de la perte et de l’oubli. Collection vivante de parfums existants ou disparus, elle protège le patrimoine mondial de la parfumerie. 

[The first conservatory of perfume in history, the Osmothèque preserves these precious and vulnerable creations from the ravages of time, from loss, and from oblivion. A living collection of perfumes, both currently available and discontinued, the Osmothèque protects the heritage of perfumery.]


It may seem that it is straightforward to assimilate L'Osmothèque with one of the great visual arts museums, but my distinct impression is that it lies much closer to a Museum of Oenology, of which there are a surprising number in existence. Why is perfume closer to wine than to the visual arts? Because both are consumable and therefore exhaustible. It is possible to empty the last bottle drawn from the last vat of a discontinued perfume after which it is essentially extinct. The reason why vintage wines command such high prices and give rise to the likes of Rudy Kurniawan is because they, too, are exhaustible.

The Osmothèque Vault

The minds behind the Osmothèque appear keen to capture for posterity the great perfumes of the past, but it is unclear whether this can or even should be done. For one thing, unlike visual arts museums, the  direct experience of the perfumes preserved at the Osmothèque is not going to be possible for the general public. Yes, select invitees may be permitted to take a sniff here and there, but the whole reason why the perfumes are kept under argon gas is because they are subject to decomposition and evaporation. If L'Osmothèque began opening up its storage containers of famous perfumes from times past to the general public, they would not last long.

In fact, even if the vessels are carefully guarded and stored, it is inevitable that one day in the future their contents will be exhausted. This implies that, in the future, all talk of such extinct perfumes will be mere hearsay. At some point, every person on the planet who ever smelled the original perfume will actually be dead, and those who continue to talk about it will simply be parroting what others have told them. Indeed, this is the case for the early perfumes listed at the Osmothèque, which are intelligent, educated reconstructions by modern perfumers of works of the distant past. What are these reconstructions based upon? The written words of others.

This is, then, one of the dangers of a book written by people with very strong but idiosyncratic opinions who claim to be offering up a guide, as opposed to a sort of autobiographical chronicle of their own peculiar tastes. Call a book “The A-Z Guide,” and lots of ignorant and gullible people will parrot whatever it says, even with no knowledge of the objects to which the words refer. This is one of the many reasons why I believe that the caustic tone of so much of The Holey [sic] Book (see A Found Review) can only have a negative effect on the world of perfumery as a whole.

Perfume users looking for "expert guidance" may follow the lead of the Royal [ties] Coup[le] and slam perfumes which they've never even experienced and dismiss without so much as a sniff many works which in fact merit our consideration, as of course the perfumers who created them believed that they did. Ignorant readers may operate under the reasonable assumption, given the title of the book, that the authors are actually experts about something beyond their own personal tastes and beliefs.

One problem I see with the Osmothèque is that it promotes this same notion, that self-proclaimed aesthetic experts really are experts, when in fact perfume perception is highly subjective (Everything you've heard and read about perfume is true!), which implies that such "perfume pundits" are really just people with particular likes and dislikes. It's one thing to be an expert about the science of olfaction and quite another to be an “aesthetic expert” about perfume—whatever that is supposed to mean. Even worse, the whole concept of institutional preservation of select perfumes holds the potential for corporate cooption.

I recall reading an announcement by Chandler Burr of his new position as curator of the Department of Olfactory Art at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City. One of the first things he mentioned was that funding was being provided by Estée Lauder, a company which obviously has a lot at stake financially in the identification of some of its and its subsidiaries' perfumes as genuine masterpieces.

Now, the arts have always had their patrons, of course. But the difference in this case as, say, from that of the visual and literary arts, which receive a great deal of public funding, is that in order for legislators to fund such an undertaking, they would need first to believe that perfumery is an art. It's a chicken-egg problem or, if you like, a catch-22. Because perfumery is not generally regarded as an art by average people (as opposed to perfumers and perfumistas), it cannot receive the sort of public funding enjoyed by the established arts. This leaves primarily corporations to foot the bill, but they obviously have a very self-interested reason in seeing to it that the products of their making receive stamps of approval from "the experts".

On the very face of it, there would seem to be the potential for deep conflict of interest in this structure, with a perfumer as the curator and the institution being funded, I presume, by some of the houses. It seems to me rather like the situation with a Museum of Oenology underwritten by Robert Mondavi or some other winemaking giant. These apparently truth-seeking institutions may start to seem more like just another promotional tool rather than an apparatus for celebrating the great perfumes of the past. Perfumery as it has developed in human societies, and in the form to which we are granted access, is a business. There may be artists working behind the scenes, but the real power at the houses lies elsewhere.

In the end, rather than attempting to turn perfume into something which it is not and could never be, perhaps we should instead celebrate this art form's essential ephemerality. Just as the value of travel inheres primarily in the experience, and not in the souvenirs and snapshots or videos which one may gather along the way, perhaps we should focus more upon the precious beauty of the fleeting moments of pleasure which perfume can bring to us, and worry less about how to bottle that experience for all time.