Did History End in 2008? Review of The Little Book of Perfumes: The Hundred Classics by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez

Most perfumistas familiar with The Holey [sic] Book—published under the title Perfumes: The A-Z Guide—appear to be aware that the “latest” Turin & Sanchez contribution to perfume writing is largely a reprint of the purple pages, the five-star reviews. The Little Book of Perfumes: The Hundred Classics is diminutive indeed, with a physical size measuring only 4.5 x 8 inches and spanning a mere 107 pages, including the slightly modified but mostly reprinted glossary and ever-so-slightly amended “best of” lists. For the benefit of those readers planning to embark on a three-hour cruise with one or the other of the authors, each has also included a handy list of top ten “desert island” perfumes.

The bulk of this not very bulky text, logically enough, reads as though its entries were literally ripped out of the original and essentially rebound to re-sell—which, of course, they were. So, for example, the review of Cacharel Loulou still ends with the sentence “This is one of the greats,” and several reviews end with the word 'masterpiece', though this is supposed to be a book of only “the greats”.

The good news is that much of the slander and snark, the rampant allegations of plagiarism, along with all of the vacuous negative criticism which never gave any reader any reason for steering clear of the perfumes despised by the authors—beyond the fact that they happen to despise them—have been omitted from The Little Book. As a result, Turin & Sanchez come off sounding more like adults and less like Beavis & Butthead, which is surely a good thing for all parties concerned. The snarling mongrels have been muzzled and the howling hyenas kept at bay in this reprint of reviews of their favorite perfumes, making this slim volume a short list of recommended fragrances which readers will surely be buying—well, except for a few.

Some of the perfumes included in this volume, notably Yohji Yamamoto Yohji Homme and Issey Miyake Le Feu d'Issey, are identified as “discontinued”. This makes the refusal of the authors to review all sorts of other discontinued great perfumes in their former volume somewhat difficult to understand. Apparently when they published The Holey [sic] Book, they believed themselves to have reviewed fresh samples of perfumes in production. Of course, they reviewed only about 10% of the perfumes in existence, but they excused themselves by saying that they had reviewed everything of which they were able to acquire samples. 

It seems that they meant all of the perfumes of which they were able to acquire free samples, as I, for one, can attest that samples are readily available for many of the houses not represented in The Holey [sic] Book (hence its true name...). In any case, although the snark is largely gone—or at least tamed down to a tolerable percentage of the text, with the authors taking aim primarily at the IFRA—the arbitrariness remains.

To her credit, Sanchez explains in the introduction that

The fragrances reviewed in this book are not the greatest of all time—instead, they are those that struck us as far above their peers in quality, inventiveness, or straightforward beauty when we surveyed nearly 1,900 during the writing of Perfumes: The A-Z Guide, ignoring all publicity, packaging, and the feelings of friends and neighbors and concentrating solely on the scent.

This caveat does not prevent Turin from continuing to proclaim that Chanel 31 Rue Cambon is “One of the ten greats of all time,” and Guerlain Après L'Ondée “One of the twenty greatest perfumes of all time,” while hailing Guerlain Derby as “One of the ten best masculines of all time.”

Where, pray tell, was the editor during the production of this book? Such claims remind me of people who offer four significant-figure answers to the question what they regard as the likelihood of rain. “I'd say there's an 86.54% chance!”

It is unclear, given Sanchez's caveat, why the subtitle of this book, The Hundred Classics, remains just as misleading as that of their first book, The A-Z Guide. The Holey [sic] Book is not “The” guide to anything beyond the authors' taste ("they" have only one...), which is great if you happen to be interested in that topic, but since most readers will never be sharing a space with, much less marrying, either Turin or Sanchez, the value of that information is rather limited.

It would have been more accurate to subtitle The Little Book (which it really is), One Hundred Classics. Of course doing that would be an admission that Turin and Sanchez are not the world-renowned aesthetic experts their publisher has marketed them as being, and which has had a self-propagating effect, as houses and decanters purveying what is said by the couple to be a “masterpiece” naturally quote them in their marketing materials as “the experts”, and then, because houses and decanters say that they are experts, this must, it seems, mean that they are. A vicious circle of deception, indeed.

To return to the question of arbitrariness, Sanchez pokes fun at the publisher for their having added four perfumes to the ninety-six which received their highest accolades in The Holey [sic] Book:

To make up for our arbitrary, ahistorical approach and to satisfy the preference of publishers for multiples of ten, we add, to the ninety-six top-ranked fragrances from our previous book, four brief writings on long-gone fragrances of historical importance.

That remark was apparently intended to be amusing, but nowhere is the choice of Coty Emeraude, L'Origan, and Chypre explained, although the fourth perfume added to bring the total to one hundred, Jacques Fath Iris Gris, created by Vincent Roubert, is pronounced to be “a possibly perfect composition.” So that's, I guess, the explanation: that Turin likes it.

Of course, none of these four perfumes exists anymore, so they were sniffed at the Osmothèque (where the  painstakingly reconstructed liquids are housed) and reviewed, why, exactly? Perhaps this was another one of the publisher's schemes (along with t.v. appearances, magazine features, etc.) to shore up the claim that the self-appointed experts are such experts that they are allowed to sniff perfumes at the Osmothèque. Which, again, confirms the claims by the houses featured in The Little Book, that its authors' judgments are indeed authoritative.

The Ce Soir ou Jamais—Eternity—Jardins de Bagatelle Connection Elucidated

To my mind, the primary value of The Holey [sic] Book lies in its provision of an answer to the question: How many insults can be squeezed into a single syllogism? Here is the answer:

1. Annick Goutal Ce Soir ou Jamais is an “Eternity wannabe”

2. Calvin Klein Eternity is “a copy of something not worth copying, Jardins de Bagatelle”

3. Guerlain Jardins de Bagatelle is “the very best of a lousy lot,” created in “a race to the bottom”

Therefore, Sophia Grojsman is a plagiarist with bad taste, and the perfumer who created Ce Soir ou Jamais is an incompetent plagiarist with even worse taste.


What?

Perhaps you did not see the word 'plagiarist' in The Holey [sic] Book, but every authored perfume condemned as a "knock-off" or "copy" or "clone" implies the existence of a named plagiarist. If you missed this the first time around, you might consider heading on over to your local community college and enrolling in a course on critical thinking or elementary logic. You will then discover that Turin & Sanchez commit every fallacy in the book. Literally.

The Little Book, happily, is largely devoid of such nonsense, although Turin labels the members of the IFRA “traitors” in one of his lamentations about a mangled reformulation. He also calls the perfume houses (rather more vaguely) “vandals and thieves” in his introduction of the Osmothèque. But, overall, this book is far less thuggish and ugly than The Holey [sic] Book, as the perfumers and perfumes disliked by the authors are simply omitted, rather than being subjected to the authors' pseudo-righteous ire and toddleresque tantrums. 

Turinia Mathematics: (1 + 5)/2 = 5!

I did find one passage in particular of The Little Book to be rather depressing. At the end of Turin's review of Etat Libre d'Orange Sécrétions Magnifiques, Sanchez writes:

2011: Smells exactly the same. For the record, there always should have been a dissenting vote from me on this one: one star, absolutely revolting, like a drop of J'Adore on an oyster you know you shouldn't eat. Whatever you do, do not allow any to touch your nose when you smell it off a paper strip. I know Luca is a convincing proselytizer, but trust me. TS

Please correct me if I am wrong in the math here, but I believe that the average of 1 star and 5 stars would be 6, divided by 2, equals 3 stars. So there you have it: a bald demonstration of what some of us suspected all along, that Tania really is just Luca's rib. The books both bear copyrights to Luca Turin, and she has no veto power to his decree of masterpieces. Should we be happy that our suspicion has been confirmed? I have to confess that I was depressed.

Nonetheless, The Little Book is a much more pleasant read, albeit a repetitive one to anyone familiar with The Holey [sic] Book. The reviews have hardly been touched, so it's the same old anecdotes about memories from the authors' idiosyncratic lives which supposedly justify the claims that these particular perfumes are not just the authors' favorites, but truly great.  

I never quite grasped that connection before: Smells like an office Turin used to work in? Or a car that he rode in as a boy? Is a perfume his dad wore? Sanchez experienced an eschatological deliverance during her fourth sniffing?

The problem with those sorts of reviews is that they are valid only for the people who had those experiences and retain those same memories. For others, L'Artisan Parfumeur Dzing! may simply smell like bandaids and dung, whatever the contents of Turin's memory bank happen to be. 

The reviews of The Hundred Classics nearly all relay stories from the authors' past experiences of these perfumes, revealing that they have worn them in some cases many times before—Turin ends his review of Parfums de Nicolaï New York with these words: Reader, I wore it for a decade. Apparently this is supposed to constitute a reason to buy the perfume for readers non-identical with Turin and likely to have divergent tastes from his own.

The autobiographical nature of the contents of these reviews strongly suggests that many, if not most, of the perfumes were pre-selected by the authors for inclusion. How many of the two- and three-star perfumes identified in The Holey[sic] Book left the authors cold or indifferent in just the way that Sanchez explicitly claims she failed to recognize what she came to regard as the greatness of Badgley Mischka the first, second, and even third time she smelled it? Only on her fourth smelling did she “grasp” that this perfume belongs among The Hundred Classics.

In order for this list to have any real merit—beyond autobiographical value—the testings would all need to have been conducted in blind trials. Of course, then the anecdotes would have disappeared, and the authors would have needed to comment on the perfumes rather than sharing memories and stories from their personal lives.

That the judgments were made independently of the packaging and the circumstances under which the perfumes were acquired seems equally dubious. Turin spends easily half the review of Amouage Gold describing his interest in the origins of the house and the packaging of the perfume. About Amouage Homage, he writes:
 

At the impossibly swank launch in Muscat of Amouage's two Jubilation scents, guests found, upon arrival in their hotel rooms, a limited edition bottle in a plain white box labeled simply Attar; i.e., "fragrance." When sampled, this anonymous thing turned out to be breathtakingly beautiful: at once lofty, tremendously radiant, and dizzyingly rich.

If such factors as "impossible swankness" were not taken into consideration in the evaluation of the perfumes, then why are they included in the reviews? Can anyone, Turin included, truthfully claim that their evaluations of a perfume are completely divorced from their encounter of its presentation in reality?

These favorable reviews, while arbitrary, do have content, which is more than could be said for the bulk of the reviews in The Holey [sic] Book—which follows from the fact that only 96 of the 1800 perfumes reviewed there garnered five stars. Many of the two-, three-, and even four-star reviews from The Holey [sic] Book give the impression of having been hastily dashed-off notes, as though Turin & Sanchez sat down with a pile of paper testing strips and a table covered with perfume bottles and had a sniffing marathon. It is painfully obvious that many of the perfumes were not given the benefit of a single full wear—much less four (or ten years' worth!). One can hardly resist the impression that all of this was a kind of “get rich and famous quick” scam which happened to pan out pretty well.

Perhaps, in the beginning, Turin & Sanchez didn't ever really believe that they'd be taken seriously as art critics. After all, hardly anyone in Western culture regards perfumery as one of the beaux arts. This might explain their sloppiness in talking about perfumes not reviewed in the volume and bestowing star ratings in what sometimes appear to be utterly random ways, driven entirely by caprice and even mood. Turin himself actually admitted as much when he told a reporter from The Independent:

They [the houses] hate my guts, but they know I can get them in the store. Perfumes are public domain, so they might as well get me in a good mood as have me trudge to Harrods in driving rain.

In The Holey [sic] Book, perfumes which garner praise are sometimes rated with only two stars, while perfumes scorned for one reason or another may receive three or even four. Perfumes are trashed for being misleadingly named or too sweet or for not containing natural this or that, but it emerges in other reviews that those “reasons” were only pretexts.

The authors are not really opposed to misnamed perfumes: Ambra di Venezia, they joke, should be named “Tuberose di Las Vegas” and has “nothing ambery or Venetian in sight,” but nonetheless receives four stars. Nor are the authors opposed, in principle, to confectionary perfumes (By Kilian Love, a meringue facsimile composed by Calice Becker, is said to be “brilliant”) or synthetic flowers (Estée Lauder Beyond Paradise—also by Becker—is said to be a masterpiece not despite but because of its “abstract” flowers). It is hard to believe that Turin would have raved so favorably about By Kilian Love, had he tested it blind, without knowing the perfumer's identity, at least judging by the strident condemnation of “candy floss” perfumes throughout The Holey [sic] Book.

In the end, there really seems to be no rhyme or reason to all of this beyond the authors' personal tastes and loyalties, and maybe that's fine. Perhaps that's all that perfume criticism can ever aspire to be, given that the meanings we find in and ascribe to perfumes derive directly from our idiosyncratic histories, our past experience, which is necessarily unique to ourselves. Everything you've heard and read about perfume is true!


The force of the authors' prescriptions—Avoid or Stock up!—presumably derives from their superior taste, or so some naïve readers apparently came to believe, having accepted that Perfumes: The A-Z Guide really was what it claimed to be. The deception campaign continued in the late summer and fall of 2011, when the imminent publication of The Little Book was announced and discussed at all of the fragrance community websites.

On her blog, Sanchez, in an effort to drum up excitement (and pre-orders) alluded to the “new essays” to be penned by Turin for the volume. The hyped new material did not materialize, aside from a plug for the Osmothèque and the four reviews of discontinued, reconstructed masterpieces entirely inaccessible to readers, as far as I am aware.

One odd feature of The Little Book is that the authors seem in the short emendations (post-reformulation) to presume the reader's familiarity with The Holey [sic] Book. Perhaps, this, too, is part of the grand marketing scheme to sell as many copies of these books as possible, before anyone else finds out that much better resources for perfume lovers are now available on the internet—for free.

Are The Hundred Classics The Hundred Classics?

 In the approximately 1,000 word new introduction by Sanchez, she takes aim at the IFRA, and in the short updates on some of the perfumes, the IFRA is blamed, again, for the damage done to some of the perfumes, apparently rendering them less than classic. It's all a bit confusing: are these The Hundred Classics? Apparently not anymore—not even to the authors themselves.

But the creation of new perfumes also did not come to a screeching halt in 2008, as the entries in this volume, published in late 2011, would suggest. The Parfumo.net database includes 1,031 perfumes launched in 2009; and 1,169 perfumes launched in 2010. Some of the perfumes included among The Hundred Classics are discontinued; four are reconstructions preserved under argon gas at the Osmothèque, and a few of the former masterpieces are said to have suffered as a result of reformulation. The authors did not remove them, however, apparently because they did not want to take the time to find any replacements to bring the number back up to one hundred again.

All of this gives the impression, once again, that Turin & Sanchez had better things to do—in this case than to explore the possibility of new masterpieces launched since 2008. It's odd, in a way, given that quite a few of the perfumes included in this volume (Guerlain Insolence, Amouage Homage, LUSH Breath of God, Chanel Cuir de Russie, Chanel 31 Rue Cambon, and others)  were launched after 2006.

This would seem to suggest, would it not, that others have certainly been launched since 2008. But no, perfume history appears to have ended on the day when Turin & Sanchez published The Holey [sic] Book, and they seem not to have much more to say. Which is fine with me. Maybe they're too busy dancing and singing around the kitchen table.

I do believe that this text has now surpassed the number of new words in The Little Book, so perhaps this would be a good place to stop.





review of The Holey[sic] Book

Tower of Babel 2, Duchamp and Art vs. Function, Beauty vs. Novelty

Is ELdO Sécrétions Magnifiques

like Marcel Duchamp's Fontaine?

Etat Libre d'Orange Sécrétions Magnifiques is a polarizing perfume, to say the least. The first and most immediate problem of polarization is generated by the very fact that the people who like it do not seem even to smell the same perfume as those who detest it. This quite naturally raises the question of whether disagreements about perfumes more generally have more to do with our idiosyncratic physiological differences—our peculiar anosmias, hyposmias and hyperosmias—than with the ostensible objects of critique, the perfumes themselves. The problem is even further compounded by the effect of variable skin factors on how perfumes manifest themselves (see: The Myth of the Skin Chemistry Myth for more on this).

The confusion does not end there, however. In an eloquent comment on The Tower of Babel, Exhibit A, Gypsy Parfumista offered a very persuasive case for the claim that ELdO Sécrétions Magnifiques can be coherently understood as a revolutionary work of conceptual art. Gypsy suggests, albeit in his own words, that this is precisely how we ought to understand Sécrétions Magnifiques:

As far as Secretions Magnifiques goes...*cracks knuckles* I have to confess that love it! I think the packaging is just what its creators wanted it to be: PROVOCATIVE! It provokes you to either (think you) hate it, because you find the art (or the actual scent) revolting, or love it (perhaps from the controversy and/or concept) before you even sniff it; or just want to own it to own it. ... I love the whole idea of what is actually exchanged when two people (regardless of gender) are intimate to be infinitely intriguing...and that someone DARED to make a perfume that attempts to capture that a feat of not only artistic vision but courage and a healthy sense of humor! … The thing about this perfume that made me think it was "artful" was that it took things no one ever dreamed of using in perfumery and united them with some interesting twists to come up with what some may be inclined to call the worst perfume in the world!

          —Gypsy Parfumista, January 9, 2012 (comments #15-19 at The Tower of Babel, Exhibit A)

I for one am willing to concede that, as much as I dislike Sécrétions Magnifiques as a perfume, it is indeed a successful piece of conceptual art. I do not, however, believe that it is one of the best perfumes ever created, far from it, in fact, and I certainly do not believe that, in blind trials, it would ever have been selected by any person knowledgeable of the history of perfume as one of the pinnacles of perfumic art.

The people who do not abhor the composition relay, as far as I've seen, rather banal experiences of it. In other words, even if one were to grant that persons anosmic or hyposmic to what are the revolting aspects of this perfume (to some wearers) are qualified to issue aesthetic judgments about the perfume as a perfume, it just seems far too pedestrian to qualify as high perfumic art, judging from the testimony of those who praise it.

That said, Sécrétions Magnifiques is something else. Upon reading Gypsy's words, I was immediately reminded of the case of Marcel Duchamp, who in 1917 submitted a urinal for exhibition at a museum, having christened his piece “Fontaine [Fountain]”, and sparked controversy and debate about the nature of art for decades to come. No one claimed that Duchamp was a great sculptor: he did not produce the urinal out of wet clay. But he was hailed as a great artist all the same.

Now those who are unimpressed with what ELdO has done in launching Sécrétions Magnifiques may dismiss it as a sort of prank or even provocation for the sake of provocation, and nothing like a great work of art. The same was said, of course, of Marcel Duchamp's Fontaine. In fact, it does not even matter very much whether or not everyone agrees about Sécrétions Magnifiques. The logic of the very question of its status is itself self-affirmatory. If everyone agreed, then there would be no controversy, and the perfume would have no value as a conceptual work of art. Again, no one agreed about Duchamp either. “Did he actually create anything?” was, I surmise, the most common skeptical question posed upon encountering Fontaine. Urinals are the most banal, ubiquitous, functional of things, used for the most unsavory of tasks, eliminating waste from the body. Can such an object be art?

What made Duchamp's Fontaine a work of art in the eyes of many was not that he had actually done anything artistic in the sense of brandishing a paintbrush or composing a piece of music or writing a poem—or producing a sculptured facsimile of a urinal. No, he took an object already in the world and decreed it to be “art”. The lack of skillful effort involved in this act was in fact an essential part of the revolutionary nature of his gesture.

One often hears remarks by unsophisticated visitors to modern art museums to the effect that I could have done that! When people scoff at works which are so simple that they could have made them—for example, a canvas painted with one uniform color—they are missing the entire point of Duchamp's act.

It seems to me that we should regard ELdO Sécrétions Magnifiques in this way as well. In the case of Sécrétions Magnifiques, as in the case of Fontaine, it is not even necessary to come into direct content with the object of controversy. No, it is the nature of such conceptual artworks to generate and perpetuate controversy and debate. Thus the fact that some people refuse to give Sécrétions Magnifiques a sniff just constitutes more grist for the controversy mill.

In his quartet of comments, Gypsy Parfumista also made an admirable, if not entirely persuasive (to me!), attempt to defend the integrity of Sécrétions Magnifiques as a great perfume. I myself remain entirely unconvinced that persons who fail to perceive the repulsive aspects of the composition are qualified to judge it, just as I would never even think to ask a deaf person's opinion of a symphony. At best, in the most charitable of possible cases, one might be able to issue a relative judgment of the quality of the perfume, just as color blind persons may well have their own unique takes on paintings which to most of us feature vivid swaths of blue and green.

To reiterate: no one claimed that Fontaine was a great work of sculpture—it was not—and I do not believe that Sécrétions Magnifiques is a masterpiece of perfumery. I furthermore suspect that, in fact, it is not possible to be both a revolutionary conceptual work of art and a masterpiece in the classical/traditional sense. The categories seem to me mutually exclusive, so arguments for one are arguments against the other.

I also think that, notwithstanding Gypsy Parfumista's brilliant defense of ELdO as a conceptual work of art, the case of perfume, in particular, is quite a bit more complicated than that of visual art, for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that there are some reigning and very fundamental confusions about the very nature of perfume in the first place. In order to subvert the concept of perfume à la Duchamp, one must first have a basic understanding and community agreement about what perfume itself is.

Duchamp wanted to say that he created a work of art out of a urinal by putting it on display and giving it a name. What would be an analogous gesture in the case of perfume? It seems to me that a far more revolutionary gesture than what ELdO did would be to launch a bottle of air! In fact, it might seem to some as though Escentric Molecules has come close (and a few other perfumers have followed suit with variations on their theme) by bottling very simple mixtures featuring as their focal note a single aromachemical.

Iso-E-super is the essence of Molecule 01, and ambroxan has been bottled under the name Molecule 02. Juliette Has a Gun has also launched a “version” of ambroxan, Not a perfume. In all of these cases, however, in contrast to that of ELdO Sécrétions Magnifiques, the primary polarization between supporters and detractors appears to revolve around not the question of the nature of the scent, but the question of whether buying such an aromachemical at a niche perfume price makes any sense.

The aromachemicals being bottled as prêt-à-porter, as it were, niche perfumes have pleasing aesthetic properties, which is why they have been selected for these projects. They are often incorporated as “boosters” of sorts to more complex compositions, and so are not generally reviled and are in fact familiar scents to people who wear and appreciate perfume.

Accordingly, on their face, the case of the one-note wonder aromachemical perfumes would seem to differ significantly from ELdO Sécrétions Magnifiques, because they are produced with the idea in mind that people really will want to wear them. And apparently they do: I saw at Aedes, for example, that Molecule 01 is one of their top sellers! The distinction between the case of a perfume produced as a provocative work of conceptual art—our example being ELdO Sécrétions Magnifiques—and perfume produced in order to be appreciated and worn as perfume, leads us directly to the question of what, precisely, perfume is supposed to be.

Art vs. Function / Beauty vs. Novelty

While many perfumistas and perfumers may wish for the object of their obsession to be taken as seriously as the products of the seven established arts, certain factors peculiar to perfume and perfumery make the realization of this hope rather problematic, it seems to me. Perfume highlights age-old conflicts between Art and Functionality, on the one hand, and Beauty and Novelty, on the other.

The Tower of Babel is relevant here, in the first instance, because it really seems as though even knowledgeable people are often talking about different things in their reviews of perfume. The problem of disparate perception (selective hyposmia, anosmia, and hyperosmia), conjoined with the problem of variable skin chemistry, is thus triply compounded by the fact that people may have conflicting ideas about what precisely makes a good perfume good!

First off, it is obvious—and I frankly doubt that anyone would attempt to deny—that the vast majority of people purchase perfume for their personal use, in order to “consume” it themselves. I read in a fashion magazine last year that the number one reason why French women use perfume is to attract suitors. What? I thought to myself, recalling my relationship with a fellow who hated perfume more than just about anything else, including crime, war, and poverty. And yet, it appears, many women and men are using perfumes precisely in order to attract someone to them. They use perfume as a means to another end. Perfume is not, for these people, an end in itself.

Other people, such as myself, use perfume for personal pleasure, and I would be very, very surprised to learn of the existence of a single perfumista who did not also cite pleasure as a primary reason for collection (and obsessing) about perfume. Do we value perfume for perfume's sake? Can a perfume smelled by no one, one which is kept under inert gas and sniffed by no one, still be a great perfume? This seems very unclear to me and raises the whole question of the Osmothèque, which we'll be taking up as a separate salon topic in the not-too-distant future.

Now, there is a strain of perfumistas, at least judging by the contents of some of their reviews, who evaluate perfumes in terms of their novelty vis-à-vis what already exists in the world. So I often see people complaining that this or that perfume is a knock-off, a blatant copy, etc., of an already famous perfume.

I myself find it very unlikely that perfumers spend time acquiring samples of other perfumers' works and subjecting them to gas chromatographical analysis so that they can reproduce the same perfume. It just strikes me as incredibly implausible. Sure, maybe some of the industrial chemists at Unilever are doing that, but bona fide perfumers, who enjoy creating perfumes? Let's just say that I would be very, very surprised, if that were the case.

It seems far more likely to me that perfumers working in different places and times may sometimes generate similar-smelling perfumes because they have been acted upon by similar cultural forces, including exposure to a variety of trends. Lots of people have been producing sweet patchouli perfumes in recent years. Does this mean that they are trying to re-produce Angel? No, it means that the idea of a sweet patchouli composition has become an accepted conceptual category from which to commence the creation of a new fragrance.

All of this raises the question of Beauty versus Novelty. What are perfumers really aiming for? My distinct impression is that the vast majority of perfumers are attempting to make beautiful perfumes. Even if they are interested in creating original perfumes, beauty seems nearly always to be a constraining factor. Beautiful perfumes are a pleasure to wear and to smell, bringing us back to the importance of pleasure once again.

I imagine that niche perfumers (although that category is itself a contested one, see: The Question of Niche ) are aiming at both beauty and novelty. What are consumers paying for? It seems to me likely that most consumers are far more interested in beauty and wearability than in novelty. For one thing, the average perfume consumer is utterly ignorant of the vast majority of 16,000+ perfumes in existence. So, from the perspective of people with limited experience, every single fragrance which they try is likely to smell “new”, whether there exist a handful or five hundred other perfumes with very similar compositions and sensory effects.

This is, of course, why marketing campaigns become far more important than perfume quality in successful launches of mainstream perfumes. Most people have no resources by which to decide whether a perfume is great or not. They can say only that it smells good on them, having been lured in to buy it by an effective marketing campaign. Many people probably also receive perfumes as gifts for the very same reasons, but once they own them, they are likely to wear them, provided that it is possible to do so. Thus wearability becomes essential to successful mass market launches and companies such as Proctor & Gamble, which manufacture thousands of personal care products, are obviously aware of this fact, which therefore must serve as a fundamental constraint on any perfume which they launch.

These issues are not new. The truth is that people have been perfuming themselves for thousands of years, and yet, still today, perfumery has not been widely recognized as the huitième art. Why not? Is it because our intimate absorption or “ingestion” (through our cells) makes perfume appreciation a different sort of process than, say, visual art appreciation? Does this bring us back to the question of disparate reception caused by the physiological factors which make perfumes repulsive to some people while having the capacity to induce veritable olfactory ecstasy in others?

What say you, O Fragrant Friends?

The Tower of Babel, Exhibit A: ELdO Sécrétions Magnifiques

I am often surprised by the strong emotions expressed by perfumistas in response to what they take to be unjust criticism. I have seen this in reviews of perfumes, remarks about houses, and—to my great surprise—even the criticism of books of perfume criticism! People are sometimes very touchy about negative criticism, and they seem to take it personally when someone comes along with a decidedly negative opinion about an object of their esteem.

I am struck by the tenor of offense taken above all in the arena of perfume, because I do not see such offense being taken in other, possibly analogous, realms. Take the case of food. I love anchovies, black licorice, eggplant, and okra, but lots of people hate all four, and some people I know hate some but love others of the items in that list. My favorite sparkling mineral water is Gerolsteiner, but a friend of mine hates it for what he regards as its metallic quality. Our difference in opinions in these cases is not a cause for any sort of strife or contention whatsoever, and I don't think that the people whom I happen to know are exceptional in this regard. People seem more often than not to have no difficulty whatsoever in disagreeing about such things.

No one gets all bent out of shape because someone else hates a food item which they love. Yes, there is a problem if someone attempts to force feed such a food to someone who hates it, but how often does that happen in reality? No, instead of inciting riots or waging wars over such matters of taste, people tend to treat the issue in the manner of adults, aware that personal preferences are determined by all sorts of contingent historical and probably biological factors which together make it seem absurd to say that one of the two people who disagree about, say, the value of anchovies, is somehow wrong, deficient, benighted, stupid, or worse: devoid of taste.

Now there are food items which self-styled epicureans or “foodies” (a.k.a. snobs) may shun, and we may secretly harbor negative attitudes toward those who consume Cool Whip, fried pork rinds, Velveeta, Little Debbies, and any number of other low-brow foods which strike us as inedible, if not revolting. But we generally keep these matters to ourselves. Who really cares, in the end, what other people eat?

Okay, it's true: I should perhaps confess that in line at the grocery store I myself do often marvel at the items in other people's carts. As they pile up on the conveyor belt box after box, after can after can, after bottle after bottle of “stuff” which I wouldn't consume if I were paid to do so, I realize, once again, how people really differ quite a lot when it comes to what they are willing and like to ingest. And it's not a matter of price, it seems, either. Some of the items which I see in other people's carts actually cost quite a lot of money, relative to the sorts of foods I typically buy. In the end, whatever the reason may be, we value different things. Our preferences diverge rather radically, but the tally of our grocery bill may end up being pretty much the same.

In the world of perfume, I see the same vast range of preferences, but, for some reason, people bristle at the condemnation of perfumes which they love, and they scoff when they learn of people who love perfumes which they hate. In an incredibly rich discussion of The Question of Niche, a number of savvy perfumista interlocutors weighed in on the nature of niche perfume and whether niche is really better than mass-market perfume, as some seem convinced is true.

While some enlightened perfumistas are able to transcend such categories and labels altogether to assess each perfume as an entity in and of itself, others remain attached the idea that niche is somehow better than non-niche perfume, even in the face of counterexamples of great perfumes available at discount emporia for a fraction of the price of many niche or luxury perfumes. What accounts for the fact that, in the area of food, people are much less easily frazzled about disagreements in evaluation than when it comes to perfume?

To offer another example, I fondly recall having met a fellow in Trinidad (he was driving a tour bus in which I was riding) who told me that his favorite food in the entire world was Spam. He was fully prepared to pay a great deal of money and make an extraordinary effort to buy Spam because he loved it so much. I found this pronouncement somewhat curious—and do not actually recall the context of the conversation in which this topic arose—but I found it rather endearing that this fellow should have a such passion for that foodstuff, despite the fact that I myself find it beneath contempt. To him, it was manna from heaven; to me, just pig parts in a blender. I believe that I even made a negative remark about the product, to which he chuckled in response. No offense taken: he knew that some people hate the stuff, but he had no problem with that. It wasn't that he thought that we Spam haters were somehow wrong. No, he simply did not care. As far as he was concerned, people like me made it the case that there was more Spam left in the universe for him to consume!

What I've observed in the case of perfume, in contrast, is that people tend to get very emotional about differences in opinion. Negative reviews are often scathing, and in some cases I'd say they verge on puerility, with the reviewer fuming in the manner of a toddler whose toy has been taken away. Some people act as though the very existence of a perfume which they abhor is some sort of crime against humanity. On the other hand, when someone condemns in the most excoriating of terms perfumes which they love, people may become equally worked up. They react as though they have been personally attacked when they read the insults bellowed out by those who hate their beloved perfumes.

Now, one reason for the distinction in the realm of perfume versus the realm of food could simply be that perfume is capable of occupying a public space and thus inflicting itself upon all those who happen to be situated in the environs of the wearer. Like second-hand smoke, unwanted perfume may well induce discomfort and anger in those who have been subjected to it against their will. Indeed, the entire story of the anti-perfume backlash of the 1990s can be explained as a reaction to this public aspect of perfume, with the self-appointed perfume police stepping in with interventionist measures designed to tutor wearers of Poison and other notorious—or legendary, as you like—perfumes to cease and desist from their anti-social behavior patterns.

I do not believe that this is only a perceived public health issue, however. My distinct impression is that people think that there is a truth about perfumes such that being wrong about them is a failure on the part of the perfumista who likes what “some say” no one should like, or who hates what “some say” is worthy of praise.

On reflection, I have often wondered whether in many of these cases we are not simply talking about different things altogether, and this is where the idea of the Tower of Babel arises in the world of perfume, it seems to me. I honestly suspect that in many cases we may simply be talking past each other when we discuss perfumes, because either the words we are using mean completely different things, or else the objects to which our words appear to refer are really quite different.

All of this sounds quite abstract, I realize, so let me offer as Exhibit A: État Libre d'Orange Sécrétions Magnifiques. My first and only experience of this perfume was during a mystery vial trial, where some evil perfumista had slipped Sécrétions Magnifiques in among the selections which I was to weigh in on without knowledge of any of the perfumes' identities, provenance, or cost. I am sorry to have to report that my sniffing of Sécrétions Magnifiques actually made me so sick that I developed a Pavlovian aversion to mystery vials and found myself unable to finish the rest of the trial.

To this day, I think of the composition of Sécrétions Magnifiques as a facsimile of a serial killer's crime scene. Clearly there is at least some sort of correspondence between my experience of this perfume and the creators' intention, judging from the image which they chose to adorn the bottle. They obviously created it explicitly to have a semen-like aspect to it, which some among us find quite repulsive, to put it mildly.

Others, of course, have raved ad nauseam about how brilliant and masterful this creation is. Turin and Sanchez rank Sécrétions Magnifiques among the top 100 “classic” perfumes. They apparently acknowledge in their recently published slim compilation of their 96 five-star reviews from Perfumes: The A-Z Guide (of which twelve have apparently been “updated”) that their list does not really pick out the 100 best perfumes of all time, but only the best which they happened to have sniffed.

In any case, my question is simply this: if we read Turin's review of Sécrétions Magnifiques and the positive reviews of others who praise this perfume, are they describing what they smell as a “serial killer's crime scene”? The answer, as far as I have seen, is: No.

In other words, the Tower of Babel problem in this case is not that some people are reviewing perfumes as artworks and others are assessing their wearability (It seems to me that, in their first book, Turin and Sanchez cannot make up their mind which they are trying to do, but that's another story). It's not the case that the people who hate Sécrétions Magnifiques are concerned with the homely hoi polloi criterion of wearability, whereas those who hail it as a masterpiece are judging it in the hoity-toity terms of lofty art criticism.

No, the reality is that the people who praise Sécrétions Magnifiques appear to be the very same people who perceive it as a floral aquatic perfume, along with perhaps some metallic qualities. They do not “get” the blood, the semen, and the murder implement aspects of this composition at all. It seems quite likely, then, that those of us who hate Sécrétions Magnifiques actually smell something entirely different from those who do not. In other words, the radical difference in opinion stems from the fact that some people who sniff this perfume are anosmic or hyposmic to precisely those components of the composition which make others among us sick.

This case raises the question, then, whether those who laud Sécrétions Magnifiques or those who loathe it are right or wrong. In thinking about this question, it occurred to me that there are possible analogies in other realms. People who are incapable of perceiving color do not make good art critics, and people who are hard of hearing do not make good music critics. What about perfume critics? Should they smell everything or only an average amount of everything?

Olfactory acuteness for each and every component of perfume would seem, as is every other trait of human beings, to be distributed over a bell curve. Are those of us who smell what those who praise Sécrétions Magnifiques as a masterpiece do not smell situated at the extreme tail of the bell curve? Are we the ones, then, who should recuse ourselves from reviewing perfumes in which those components figure?

Are some of us simply too sensitive, and so are we wrong in thinking that the perfume is repulsive—similar to the manner in which people who think that they “hear voices” are wrong? Sure, such people may be more sensitive—hypersensitive, in fact—to environmental stimuli, but in reality they are not the people to whom we turn in deciding what exists and what does not. Are we who dislike Sécrétions Magnifiques intensely, then, somehow “sick” for smelling too much? Should we figure out a way to “dial down” our olfactory acuteness?

It seems to me that it doesn't make a lot of sense, in the end, to say that one or the other group is right and the other is wrong. The fact is that we are different. Just as the factors which conspire to give individual people their unique scent affect how perfume will smell on their skin (see The Myth of the Skin Chemistry Myth, for more on this...), so, too, do variable factors determine to some extent what we smell.

The best perfume critics may not be those who are hyperosmic, even if it is true that they detect more than the average person does. On the other hand, those who are hyposmic, too, will have their own unique take on a perfume such as Sécrétions Magnifiques. In the end, a reviewer's opinions reveal one and one thing alone: what that particular person perceives in smelling a given perfume. Nothing follows from that evaluation for any other person because they may or may not be relevantly similar to the reviewer.

I should perhaps opine here that, in the case of Sécrétions Magnifiques, I strongly suspect that the composition itself, sniffed alone in a blind testing, without knowledge of the bottle design, its provenance, and the fact that it was launched by a “daring” niche house, would nary garner the attention that this perfume has. Let's face it: the whole production has a vaguely adolescent facet to it. An ejaculating penis? Ooooh!!! Wow!! Cool!!! I can imagine teenagers flush with hormones exclaiming with glee. To be perfectly frank (quoi d'autre?), I would be very, very surprised, if the folks at ELdO were not snickering all the way to the bank at the success of this heist.

Am I merely picking on Turin and Sanchez (again?! groan the groupies, whose duct tape is magically dissolved by this site...)? No. I base this conjecture on the content of the non-negative reviews of Sécrétions Magnifiques. Read the reviews closely, and you will discover that the people who do not hate this composition describe it in innocuous terms. Since when was a masterpiece of perfumery so banal? I ask most sincerely. It seems equally obvious that some of the people who praise this perfume are simply parroting the self-appointed prophets of perfume. If “the experts” say that something is a masterpiece, then we should agree, should we not?

The Tower of Babel arises in comparing perfume reviews in the first instance because different people appear truly to be smelling different things. Despite the fact that a perfume may have been drawn from the very same vat, some sniffers will find different components of the perfume salient than will others. The upshot of all of this is that the most which we can learn from reading other reviewers' assessments is that there exist people who perceive it in that way. They are neither right nor wrong, and their opinions should be taken into consideration when it seems that a perfume which we are considering wearing actually makes other people physically ill. But within the privacy of our own homes, anything goes, so go right ahead, it's all the same to me: eat Twinkies, drink Koolaid, and wear Sécrétions Magnifiques!