If you’re into fantastic scent — really into fantastic scent, as an increasing
number of people are — then Luca Turin needs no introduction. When it comes
to unravelling the olfactory mysteries, he is the man. He knows everything
that needs to be known, from the science (Turin is a biophysicist, and about
to take up a chair at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) to how they
make something smell like it does, and why. He has even had a book, The
Emperor of Scent, written about him, and has been the subject of a BBC
documentary.
Most thrilling, though, he is also a brilliant writer. You or I might be hard
pushed to describe even a beloved fragrance: we might say it smells
“amazing”, “slightly weird”, “extraordinary” or “old-fashioned”; you may
mutter about top notes of this and base notes of that (though most fragrance
descriptions seem to be written, badly, by people with no nose, who make up
ludicrous things — nothing smells of “diamonds”, though a bestselling
fragrance I shan’t name smells, according to Turin, of “carrots and
mildew”).
Beyond that, our vocabularies fail us. Which is hardly surprising — scent is,
in many ways, the oddest sense: you can’t show somebody a fragrance, or make
them taste it, touch it or listen to it. Despite this, our sense of smell
taps into things such as memory, desire and dreams. It is supremely
evocative, and our reactions to it are both minutely subjective and
universal. In my case, the tiniest whiff of Fleurs de Rocaille (Caron) can
send me spinning back through the decades to specific afternoons spent with
my W grandmother. Calèche (Hermès) reminds me of the smell in the car when
my mother dropped me off at boarding school. Kouros (YSL) instantly reminds
me of my first boyfriend, whom I would never remember otherwise. Poison
(Dior) saw me through university — it seems rather incredible now that
people didn’t collapse, gasping for breath and begging for windows to be
opened — and Fracas (Piguet) through my twenties, until pregnancy did
something weird to my nose and made me loathe the scent of tuberose, which
I’d previously adored. Perfume can seduce, repel, comfort, nourish or even
give you a “mental hard-on”, according to Turin, who describes scent as “a
chemical poem”.
It is also sublimely democratic: anybody with a few quid in their pocket can
transform themselves, with a judicious squirt, from dowdy mouse to sex bomb
or (more interesting) vice versa. You can smell of beach, of cake, of
sun-baked herbs and sex, of flowers or of the harem; of languid odalisque or
trashy dolly; of burlesque dancer or dental technician. You can smell chic,
sophisticated, brainy or dim; you can smell quiet or loud, friendly or not.
And, unlike make-up, which also has these quasi-magical, personality-
altering properties, applying scent doesn’t require any skill.
There are 6,000 perfumes out there, however. Even if you drenched yourself in
half-a-dozen random scents every time you hit a department store, you’d only
ever touch the tip of an enormous iceberg. How are you supposed to sort the
wheat from the chaff, the dross from the marvels? The blogosphere is heaving
with genuinely independent advice, some of it better than others, but much
of it lacks any sense of authority or depth of knowledge — and there’s still
the vocab problem.
Enter Turin and Perfumes: The Guide, co-authored by his equally gifted wife,
Tania Sanchez. They met through perfume, poetically enough: Turin was
blogging about scent; she replied to some of his posts, “and her writing
seemed to be in fluorescent pink, somehow”; he asked her to cast her eye
over his previous book, The Secret of Scent; they met; they married last
year in New York. They are now the unwitting Brangelina of the scent world.
Perfumes: The Guide is one of the best books I have ever read. It is
dazzlingly good. There isn’t a sentence out of place; Sanchez matches Turin
for writing with wonderful style and wit, and encyclopaedic knowledge; and
every entry — there are 1,500 of them — is like a good short story: Dorothy
Parker by way of Proust. They don’t mince their words, either: they have a
nice line in utterly devastating put-downs. But they also guide you towards
scents you’d never have tried otherwise. Pleasingly, they are not snobs.
There has always been a sense among perfume addicts that niche brands were
automatically superior to mass-market ones; that anything you could pick up
for less than £30 was bound to be dramatically inferior to a bottle thrice
the price. Not so, say Turin and Sanchez: most of the greatest noses — of
whom there aren’t many — work for the huge firms as well as the smaller ones
(for which they moonlight because they’re “so fed up [with the constraints
imposed by some of the big firms] that they can't stand it”).
Their guide will lead you to make extraordinary olfactory discoveries. Turin
himself led me to the One when I met him and his wife (their house is
literally stuffed with scent bottles — on the wall, in piles, in boxes, on
tables: writing their guide took a year of daily sniffing). “Smell this,” he
said, pushing a little bottle of Bulgari Black in front of me. “I don’t say
this very often, but it would be very good on you.” More than very good, it
turns out — the stuff is life-changing. That’s the thing about finding an
amazing scent: you just feel it’s you, but better, in a bottle. “Look at
this one,” Turin says, picking up Jatamansi (L’Artisan Parfumeur). “Done by
a complete beginner, but wonderful.”
“This one,” says Sanchez of another bottle, “is a train wreck.”
“Do you know,” says Turin, “that the formula represents 3% of its total cost?”
The rest is packaging and marketing.
“I have a friend who works for a perfume company,” Sanchez says. “They wanted
to put a sticker on the bottle, but doing so would have cost more than the
entire perfume.”
“Good perfume used to come out of companies such as Estée Lauder,” says Turin,
“and it cost 30 bucks. Now it costs $200 and you have to deal with some guy
in a black turtleneck.”
Sanchez adds: “And there’s an issue with longevity. I called up Avon and said,
‘You sell more perfume than any company in the world, you’ve had huge
sellers since the 1970s. Can you send me some?’ But the PR girl said, ‘No,
we’re not going to sell those any more.’ I said, ‘People have been buying
them for decades. Are you just going to cut them off?’ ” Apparently so, in
the name of fashion — but then truly great perfume is outside fashion and,
says Sanchez, “timeless”. Why, I ask, do they think nobody seems terribly
interested in making classic perfumes any more? “They think a great perfume
is a random event,” says Turin. “They think it’s an act of God. But Angel
[Thierry Mugler], for example, wasn’t an act of God — it was the work of a
genius. There’s often also a fabulous, panoramic ignorance of the past: they
don’t know shit from shoeshine. I’m not saying, ‘Do the old stuff again,’
I’m saying, ‘Know how good it can be before you go ahead and do your Britney
Spears.’ ”
The worst problem affecting the perfume industry, Turin says, is “a complete
lack of art direction. Nobody realises that every great perfume was
art-directed by somebody who had a clear vision of what he wanted, above and
beyond the perfumer. There is fantastic cohesion between the smell, the
bottle, the colour, the packaging — the whole thing is amazing, miraculous,
not random. That doesn’t happen very often: now you’ve got some guy in
marketing and a tie-in with some model. Art direction is why Serge Lutens
[the famous creator of Shiseido Nombre Noire] is such a genius; he is
obsessed to the point of disease”.
Sanchez and Turin are obsessed, too, but disease doesn’t come into it: they’re
clever, funny, knowing and knowledgeable, and they’ll lead you by the hand
into a whole new world of scent. I’ll bet you a fiver you’ll be down the
shops later, spraying like mad. When you strip everything else away, perfume
is liquid joy, and who doesn’t want a little bit of that?
What makes a fantastic perfume?
The question that women casually shopping for perfume ask more than any other
is this: “What scent drives men wild?” After years of intense research, we
know the definitive answer. It is bacon.
Now, on to the far more interesting subject of perfume. It is a mistake to
think that the overwhelming reason for women to wear perfume is to attract
the opposite sex. But, as the biophysicist and fragrance expert Dr Luca
Turin once explained to me regarding the peculiar, temperature-independent
scanty dress of many young women at night, what a woman on the prowl
requires is something that men will register after six beers.
Perhaps this attention-getting olfactive strategy can also, in a way, explain
the second mistake, milder than the first, but still quite wrong, that women
tend to make when choosing a fragrance, which is to assume that the reason
to wear perfume is to impersonate a flowerbed. This is a very fine strategy
if your aim is to attract bees. Otherwise, you could do better.
Yes, everyone loves the smell of a fresh tea rose on its thorny stem or of
warm, clustered jasmine blossoms, like white stars against their greenery,
but a flower is not quite a perfume. The fragrances known as soliflores,
meant to represent a single material or flower, nice as they may be, have a
hard time competing with the best perfumes unless they cheat in more
interesting directions, because, unlike perfumers, flowers aren’t interested
in us. Flowers are more like plug-in air fresheners than perfumes. They emit
a steady puff of stuff, which floats off and meets you at a distance and
then flies away, replenished constantly. So, let us talk properly of
perfume: what a woman’s perfume is for, and what makes it good, great or
dismal.
Perfume is an art. The arts appeal in various ways to our various senses, and
if you want to think long and hard about such things, I recommend reading a
lot of Walter Pater. For the moment, let’s just say that, like all other
arts, perfume should engage our attention to a satisfying end, first
creating an expectation and then satisfying it in a way different and better
than you’d hoped.
Everyone complains that new perfumes all smell alike, but occasionally,
someone hits on a variation that constitutes a true advance. Great artistic
advances are often spurred by technological ones: guitars go electric,
prussian blue knocks down the price barrier to painting dusky skies, and
ladies casually swan about smelling like peaches. As Turin points out,
Guerlain Mitsouko is, in structure, basically Coty’s landmark, Chypre, with
the peach base Persicol added. However, it doesn’t smell like two distinct
things hashed together — far from it. Instead, it smells like a new
creature, Mitsouko: an autumnal, poignant chord, rounded and full, something
that feels, on first meeting, as if you have known it before, the way
certain people you meet seem as if they were expecting you, or you them,
even if you are strangers.
What we’re really talking about is the art of abstraction in perfumery: the
creation of a new smell for its own qualities, and not for any fidelity to
things already known. How is it done? Magic. The idea is simple enough once
you know it’s there, but finding and recognising it is not so easy. You can
no more predict the next great beautiful perfumery idea than you can the
next catchy melody before you hear it.
Now, you may think perfumery is pretty easy if so much relies on happy
accidents, but three things need to be in place for a happy accident to
become worthwhile: someone must be obsessed and daring enough to tinker and
generate new ideas; someone must be able to spot the one good idea among a
host of useless ones; and someone needs the skill to realise the idea’s
potential. The breathless claims of fragrance marketing to the contrary, it
is just not true that fine ingredients guarantee a great perfume. Imagine
chucking a fresh Maine lobster, a wheel of top-notch camembert and a pound
of artisanal Venezuelan chocolate into a kettle and simmering in Chartreuse
until Wednesday. Yummy? It doesn’t work for perfume, either.
Extracted from Perfumes: The Guide by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez,
published on September 11 (Profile £20). To order it for £18, call The
Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585 or visit timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst.
perfumestheguide.com
The best . . .
Mitsouko (Guerlain)
Reference chypre Whenever I am asked to name my favourite fragrance, or
the best fragrance ever, or the fragrance I would take with me if I had to
move to Mars for tax reasons, I always say Mitsouko. This elicits, broadly
speaking, three types of response: perfumers yawn, beginners write down the
name and aficionados decide I am a staid sort of chap. In truth, it is a bit
like saying your favourite painting is the Mona Lisa (not mine, by the way).
Mitsouko’s history illustrates to perfection the twin forces of innovation and
imitation that move perfumery forward. It was released in 1919, supposedly
the result of a love affair Jacques Guerlain had with Japan or a lady
therein. But there is nothing Japanese about Mitsouko, aside from the name.
It is, as has been said countless times before, an improvement on François
Coty’s Chypre, released two years earlier. Chypre, in turn, was based on a
three-component accord so perfect that it remains unsurpassed and fertile in
new developments 90 years later. They smell, respectively, of citrus
resinous, sweet-amber resinous and bitter resinous. Picture them as equal
sectors making up a pie chart, sticking to each other via the resin. The
resulting genre, called a chypre, has two fundamental qualities: balance and
abstraction. Chypre is long gone, but I’ve had occasion to smell both
vintage samples and the Osmothèque museum’s reconstruction in Versailles. It
is brilliant, but it does have a big-boned, bad-tempered, Joan Crawford feel
to it. It was a fragrance in whose company you could never entirely rest
your weight.
Jacques Guerlain was Juan Gris to Coty’s Picasso, obsessed with fullness,
finish, detail. To Chypre, he added the peach note of undecalactone, quite a
lot of iris and probably 20 other things we’ll never know about. The lactone
makes a huge difference: it works like a Tiffany lamp, adding a touch of
muted warmth and colour, and, unlike ester-based fruit notes, lasts for
ever. The effect of these additions is a ripening of the chypre structure
into a masterpiece whose richness brings to my mind the mature chamber music
of Johannes Brahms.
Mitsouko is also a survivor, most recently having dodged a bullet aimed
straight at its heart by the European Union’s chemical phobia. It looked,
for a while, as if it was going to be reformulated in a hurry. In the end,
the great Edouard Fléchier brought Mitsouko into conformity with EU rules
and it still smells great, though it arguably doesn’t last as long as the
old one.
. . . and the worst
Pure Purple (Hugo Boss)
Cherry syrup Smells exactly like the synthetic flavour used in codeine
syrup, but induces a hacking cough instead of relieving it.
Délices de Cartier (Cartier)
Fruity, vile There’s a sketch by Billy Connolly where two Glasgow
drunks go to Rome, enter a bar, and ask: “What does the Pope drink?” The
barman says: “Crème de menthe,” whereupon the two guys say: “Give us a
pint,” and spend the rest of the week puking up green in various fountains.
Substitute cassis for mint, and you have Délices.
Euphoria Men (Calvin Klein)
Nondescript “It’s about passion that stops at nothing” — not even
flogging a rubbish fragrance for real money.
Luca Turin
To join Colin McDowell and Style for an evening with the perfume guru Luca
Turin at Selfridges, click
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