Perfumes

"Luca Turin and his wife Tania Sanchez wrote this A-Z guide to perfume. Open it up on any page, start reading and it’s just brilliant. It’s funny, it’s snarky. For example, Turin and his wife compare one perfume, “Diorella” by Christian Dior, to a Vietnamese beef salad. He slams on perfumes by Paris Hilton. His one-sentence review of her perfume “Can Can” is “Can it, by all means”. Luca Turin is a brilliant scientist, and has come up with his own theory about where our sense of smell comes from. Because nobody really knows. We know how we see and how we hear, but the sense of smell remains mysterious. And yet smell seems to trigger incredibly intense, emotional memories of the past – of our mother putting on perfume, of aged aunts coming by, of fur coats, even of bad things that have happened to us. Perfume is a memory trigger. I’m fascinated by perfume both as an intellectual study and as a purely aesthetic, hedonistic thing. My mother was a White Russian. Her family settled in Nice in southern France, and she grew up there and came to America after World War II . As a proper French lady, she always had a shelf of perfumes in our bathroom. She wore “Chanel No. 5”, “Je Reviens” by Worth, Dior, Yves St Laurent, Madame Rochas and Femme. As a little girl I was fascinated. They were beautiful crystal bottles, and she allowed me to bring them down very carefully and indulge myself by spritzing away. Many days when I was little and wandering around the house bored, I would end up in the bathroom with all these bottles, looking at the labels, spraying, dabbing, taking baths with the bath oils. So from very early on I was fascinated by the richness of perfume. It was a very pleasurable thing, like eating an ice cream cone. It triggered some kind of pleasure sensor in my brain. When I started dating I would steal my mother’s perfume, and eventually I started buying my own. I grew up with perfume. It was part of my psychological, sensual landscape. But what really made me fall down the rabbit hole into Alice in Wonderland was going to the Goodwill [store] one day. I found a perfume called “Chaos” by Donna Karan. I spritzed a little on my wrist and thought, “Ooh! That’s very spicy and incense, it reminds me of Roman Catholic high mass.” I was intrigued by it, and so I googled it. I found it was a discontinued, highly sought-after perfume which was fetching $280 (£180) per bottle on eBay. I liked it even more after that. I also thought, “I can sell this on eBay myself and make some money.” So I ran back to the Goodwill and bought it, thinking I was going to sell it. I didn’t get around to it. It just sat on my dresser. Every morning I would spritz it, sniff and think, “Gosh! There’s something about this perfume.” I went online and started to read about the notes. There’s a wonderful site called Basenotes . It tells you the individual notes of a perfume, when it was created, who was the perfumer and whether it’s still in production. People also post reviews, some of which are very erudite. The more I read about “Chaos” the more I puzzled, “What is it about this perfume that people just go nuts about?” On the fifth day I sprayed some on, and I got it all of a sudden. I never sold it. It’s still on my dresser in its little box, because you want to keep it away from the sun. That was the start. Then I started exploring perfumes with other notes. Another wonderful site is The Perfumed Court , where you can buy tiny one millilitre vials of any perfume, including discontinued, rare, vintage ones. If you’re curious and don’t want to buy a whole bottle, you can buy a sample of Chanel’s “Cuir de Russie”, which is Russian leather and can only be bought at Chanel boutiques. I started buying and swapping perfume samples with other like-minded souls. For a couple of years, that was my secret obsession. I slowly amassed a gigantic collection of perfumes. I don’t even know how many I have. It’s in the hundreds. I read everything I can about it. I read what other people are writing about different perfumes, and that led me to the Luca Turin book. I’ve pretty much memorised it. I can look at a bottle with no label and tell you exactly what it is. The book is really a Bible for the perfumista. What I like to do is to dab on something and then read the reviews. I usually start with the review in the Guide . I don’t always agree with what Luca Turin says, and many people I know don’t agree with him, but he is a very important baseline. He brings such a breadth of historic, esoteric and aesthetic knowledge about each perfume, and he gives you the background of it. If you’re interested in perfume it’s a really great place to start, because you can look up your favourites and see what he says about them. It’s like having the Wikipedia or Encyclopaedia Britannica of perfume at your fingertips. Turin is just brilliant. He’s French and Italian, became fascinated with scents and perfume, and would seek out rare and old vintages and write about them. Somehow he persuaded someone to publish it as a book. There’s also a wonderful biography of him, The Emperor of Scent by Chandler Burr, the former perfume critic for The New York Times and probably the second most influential person to publicise perfumery today. He was a scientist, but he had an obsession about perfume and was able to write brilliantly about it, to synthesise in two paragraphs the essence of what a perfume smells like. He’s actually not writing about perfume anymore now. The thing about perfume criticism is that it’s a very new field. It doesn’t necessarily have its own vocabulary. It’s difficult to write about perfume without using the other senses. You can say that a perfume smells like ambergris, or it has notes of cherry almond marzipan, but in writing about the sense of smell there’s a paucity of vocabulary. You’re forced to talk about what it tastes like, or what kind of fruit it evokes. Or that it has a petrol note to it. Luca Turin was the first person to wrestle with this issue and write about perfume beautifully. People argue about his reviews, but he has brought a recognition to the field that is extremely important. He is the tsar of perfume, whether you agree with him or not. But I don’t want to downplay the contributions of Tania Sanchez. They worked together on the book and each did half the reviews."