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Perfumes: The A-Z Guide

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Format: Paperback


Description

In the book that started it all, Turin and Sanchez bring perfume appreciation to the attention of the wider culture with their critically lauded guide to over 1,800 fragrances, from their all-time favorites to a stinker described as “like getting lemon juice in a paper cut.” Introductory essays educate the reader on how perfumes are made, what they’re made of, and which are historical and cultural landmarks. Smelling through the top ten lists should be one of any perfume fanatic’s life goals. Read more


Publisher ‏ : ‎ Perfüümista OÜ (February 14, 2019)


Language ‏ : ‎ English


Paperback ‏ : ‎ 566 pages


ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9949889677


ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 79


Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.66 pounds


Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 1.42 x 8.5 inches


Best Sellers Rank: #97,269 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #217 in Arts & Photography Criticism


#217 in Arts & Photography Criticism:


Customer Reviews: 4.5 out of 5 stars 686 ratings


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Top Amazon Reviews

    • Outstanding, groundbreaking, thorough, passionate and funny. A Defense of Perfumes The Guide
This is a comment I made to another review that I decided to post as a review as well. This is a brilliant, original, funny, thought provoking and informative book. At the time it was written there was nothing like it, and nothing surpasses it. I have learned far more from this book about scent, combinations of scent and the appreciation of them than I have from anything else I've encountered. It delighted me, and also instructed me on new and helpful ways to approach sensory evaluation in my work (wine). I absorbed more about approaching and categorizing sensory evaluation and bringing life, interest, precision and structure to it than I have from any number of oenology texts and professional articles. Not that most of those books or articles were bad, but that this book is that good. Yes, this is high level criticism from people who rank somewhere beyond "enthusiast" in their interest in the subject. What fascinates them, like what fascinates or delights most devotees of anything, goes well beyond what the majority of people would wish or need to know about the subject. Their encyclopedic knowledge, incisive writing and vast passion for the subject mean much more to me, however, than a paragraph of disclaimers about heat index, humidity, skin pH, age, the fact that you woke up grumpy and some sort of contrived "grading rubric" would. Also, I find them hilarious. Their positive reviews are rhapsodic, their negative ones, blistering - passion combined with piercing discernment. Honestly, I don't care what the mainstream world thinks of most perfumes. Give me the obsessive interests, strong opinions and vaulting enthusiasms of Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez over what some other reviewers seem to want - the po-faced seriousness and studied middle-of-the-road dullness and strained objectivity of a Consumer Reports article about perfume. If you're looking for The Consumer Reports Guide to Perfume and Fragrance, and little gray bubbles in columns, this isn't it. But how can a regular person benefit from such a work? Let's take an example nearly every American over a certain age knows. Siskel and Ebert. I think they were so successful at critiquing film for mainstream audiences because it was easy to get a sense of each critic's approach. You learned that you could trust their opinions, sometimes in a negative way. But they weren't just mainstream, they saw everything. They were film obsessives. That obsession sometimes helped some obscure movies find a wider audience, and encouraged millions of people to try some things they might have avoided otherwise, or to go watch an older masterpiece at home. This is the case for me with this book. It's pretty easy to spot where you and the reviewers will agree or disagree after a trip to the perfume counter, and then the book is more valuable still. Some critiques seem to suggest this book is for elitists, or the pretentious. I couldn't disagree more. Turin and Sanchez clearly believe perfume is a form of high art accessible to almost anybody. So if you're looking for something agreeable, solid, mainstream, and affordable they identify such products quite well. They heap praise on Old Spice, Stetson and Tommy Girl for example- that's pretty much the opposite of pretension to me. They mainly insist that whatever you wear, at any price point, be good. And they suggest, time and again, that price and enjoyability are rarely linked, except in the necessary expense of certain natural components. And they tell you who spends the money for "the good stuff" and who doesn't. Pretty much every technical criticism leveled against the book concerning both the subjective qualities and chemical difficulties of perfume analysis is acknowledged by the authors, by the way. In the end, you simply can't account for everything, for everyone, but with such a vast storehouse of reviews, with consistent voices, you can find a solid shared grounds for analysis quite easily in my opinion. Which is sort of the point of expert analysis and critique, really. There is also a line of criticism here that runs along the lines of "But I can just read stuff on the internet about this, it's the same. It's just like, someone's opinion, man." So, art criticism has an element of subjectivity to it. Who knew? That criticism entirely misses the point. The point is finding true experts who voices you trust. Sure, that trusted advice certainly could come from an online community. When I need a medical diagnosis, or financial advice, I trust the random collection of experts I find on the internet. Opinions are just opinions. Why would you ask a doctor what her opinion is when you can just ask the internet? Why read a PhD who theorized an entirely new, and quite possibly correct, mechanism for scent when it's just, like, his opinion man? The main trouble to me is that dozens of new perfumes are introduced every year. The book will fall ever further behind on new releases, and things that are being aggressively marketed until there is a new edition. But that's small potatoes to me. Almost all the greats, and classics they talk about are available to try somewhere, even via an internet sampler. That's where to start anyway, to learn how this stuff works, and how to translate the words into scents. (Finally the critiques of various other critics are sort of hilarious - "How can he rate this five stars when I absolutely hated it! Worthless!" ) ... show more
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 22, 2016 by Xiane
    • Worth Buying, But Beware
Turin argues in his earlier book, _The Secret of Scent_, that smell is not so much about memory and biology, as is widely believed, as it is about beauty and imagination. He believes, furthermore, that one of the highest achievements in perfumery is what he terms "abstraction," that is to say, the creation of olfactory accords that, while perhaps alluding to natural smells, are novel and resistant to definition. These aesthetic axioms (which he presumably shares with co-author/wife Tania Sanchez) are the basis of the evaluations in this book, and we, as readers, have no choice but to take them or leave them. These axioms lead the authors to prefer complex fragrances over simple ones, fragrances that develop over time to linear ones, original and/or unique fragrances over skillful executions of old ideas, "interesting" (even if vaguely unpleasant) fragrances over boring (even if pleasant) ones, etc. In a nutshell, they apply the same standards to perfume that other critics usually apply to other arts. They want perfumery to be taken seriously as an art form, and say as much. This is a legitimate view, and one to which I am highly sympathetic. That said, I think the authors overlook (or deliberately ignore) some of the factors that render the purely aesthetic appreciation of perfume difficult at best. First of all, perfumes are made to be worn. The final aesthetic effect of a fragrance is inseparable from the time, place, and person(s) involved. Of course this "framing" or contextualization effect is at work in all art forms, but it is arguably more important for perfumery than for others. Given the fact that perfumes are mixtures of chemicals, factors such as temperature, humidity, skin pH, decomposition, underlying body odor, age-related hyposmia, differing olfactory thresholds, etc., make this state-dependence even more crucial. And, regardless of what Turin might say, it is simply impossible to separate a fragrance from the associations (read: memories) it may evoke. Perhaps it's possible to "see" the Platonic form of a perfume behind all of these contingencies, but I highly doubt it. Our reactions to smells are visceral before they're intellectual or aesthetic, no doubt because our sense of smell is our primary sentinel against many toxins and pathogens. Individual differences in sensitivity to certain aromatic chemicals are highly significant and render any kind of objective discussion of fragrances impossible. We're not even working with the same equipment--it's like a society of people who are all partially blind to different colors trying to discuss color coordination. The fundamental variability of our olfactory apparatus, even before differences in taste are taken into account, makes the arrogance of some of the pronouncements in this book a bit galling. People *wear* fragrances (as opposed to sniffing them on strips--decidedly a minority pastime) for a variety of reasons: to make a statement, to find comfort or stimulation, to complement a particular ensemble, to seduce (and here the tastes of the quarry count far more than Apollonian meditations on beauty), and even, in some parts of the world, to mask the fact that they haven't bathed (it's no wonder that perfumery reached its pinnacle in Europe, where people didn't--and sometimes still don't--bathe regularly). Most people simply want a fragrance to make the day a little more pleasant for themselves and for those around them, not because they want to wear a work of "art" whose complexity and depth are going to make heads turn or spark a discussion about the relative merits of gourmand chypres and aromatic fougeres. Hence the incomprehension and hurt feelings that have greeted some of the harsher reviews in this book. Assuming that one buys into the premise that perfume is a pure art, the authors, in general, seem to have excellent (i.e., informed, refined, and considered) taste--except when it comes to reviewing the work of their friends. Turin, for example, rates Calice Becker's Beyond Paradise Men as one of the top ten masculines currently in production. Since it isn't very expensive I decided to take a chance and buy it blind on his recommendation. The highly synthetic headache-in-a-bottle I got stuck with isn't terrible, I suppose, but if it's one of the top ten masculines that money can buy in early 2008, then I'm Jacques Guerlain. In a different part of the book I discovered that Turin is good friends with Becker. Ah ha... I don't mean to suggest that Turin was cynically shilling for a friend, but rare is the man who is immune to the tender, insidious persuasions of friendship. I'm certain no one else on the planet would rate that fragrance quite so highly. Such are the dangers inherent in taking the word of a consummate industry insider without a huge grain of salt. Turin also awards points for historical importance to fragrances he can't even stand to be around--Opium, for example. This, I think, is taking the "perfume as art" shtick a little too far. When reviewing fragrances that knock their socks off (especially a fragrance saturated with some deep personal significance) both authors (but Sanchez in particular) tend to wax poetic and come off the rails in terms of actually describing the fragrance. Some of this lyricism is quite affecting, but alas too much of it sounds like an exercise for a creative writing workshop, and the straining for effect turns tiresome. The humor, too, is witty in spots but tends consistently towards juvenile mockery and inane plays on perfumes' names. All of these caveats aside, this is a very informative and often entertaining book. If you love fragrances, it is clearly a must-buy because it offers an excellent idea of which to sample next. If it educates consumers to stop buying and chides producers to stop making the cheap and and often hideous potions flooding the market, it will have done its job. I've learned a lot from the book and am grateful to the authors for having written it, but in the end it's more trustworthy as a Baedeker than as a Michelin. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 9, 2008 by spheremusic

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