| Perfumes: The Guide | 
 enlarge | Authors: Luca Turin, Tania Sanchez
Publisher: Viking Adult
Category: Book
List Price: $27.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  61 reviews
Sales Rank: 4072
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 400
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 5.5 x 1.6
ISBN: 0670018651
Dewey Decimal Number: 668.54
EAN: 9780670018659
ASIN: 0670018651
Publication Date: April 10, 2008
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Condition: SATISFACTION GUARANTEED! NEW Book! May have remainder mark. Most orders ship within 1 BUSINESS DAY with ORDER CONFIRMATION.
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Book Description
The first book of its kind: a definitive guide to the world of perfume
Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez are experts in the world of scent. Turin, a renowned scientist, and Sanchez, a longtime perfume critic, have spent years sniffing the world's most elegant and beautiful--as well as some truly terrible--perfumes. In Perfumes: The Guide, they combine their talents and experience to review more than twelve hundred fragrances, separating the divine from the good from the monumentally awful. Through witty, irreverent, and illuminating prose, the reviews in Perfumes not only provide consumers with an essential guide to shopping for fragrance, but also make for a unique reading experience.
Perfumes features introductions to women's and men's fragrances and an informative "frequently asked questions" section including:
What is the difference between eau de toilette and perfume?
How long can I keep perfume before it goes bad?
What's better: splash bottles or spray atomizers?
What are perfumes made of?
Should I change my fragrance each season?
Perfumes: The Guide is an authoritative, one-of-a-kind book that will do for fragrance what Robert Parker's books have done for wine. Beautifully designed and elegantly illustrated, this book will be the perfect gift for collectors and anyone who's ever had an interest in the fascinating subject of perfume. Picking a Perfect Perfume  For Perfumes: The Guide, Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez tested nearly 1,500 fragrances--some glorious, some foul. Here they offer some humble advice on finding something worth loving among the stinkers. 1. Smell top to bottom
Perfumes usually unfold in three (often very different) stages: the sparkling first few minutes are the fragrance's top note, followed by its true personality, known as the heart note, and ending with the base note, aka the drydown, hours later. Something you love at the counter you may loathe by the parking lot. We recommend top-to-bottom tests on skin and on paper, since some scents that disappoint on the heat of skin may shine on your shirtsleeve. 2. Write it down
Bring a pen to write names on paper test strips, so you're not in anguish hours later, trying to recall which is the third scent from the left that transports you to Shangri-La. Keep a cheap, possibly extremely trashy paperback on hand, so you can store strips between pages to keep them separate. 3. Rest your nose
Noses tune out, which is why you can smell your friends' homes but not your own. Smell no more than five scents per day on paper strips and try on only the best one or two, to keep your nose reliable. 4. Check the radiance
To get a good sense of how the perfume will smell to other people as you walk past, try spraying a test strip and leaving it in the room while you step out for a bit. Come back fifteen minutes later and breathe in: that's the radiance.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 56 more reviews...
 Reader Beware: Something stinks here April 12, 2008
39 out of 54 found this review helpful
A perfume guide: Sounds like a wonderful idea, doesn't it? Something to help you navigate the flood of scents at the department store counters, to help you sort through the dross and pluck out the gold. I hoped that this is what this book would be. But sadly, it is not. This book is hardly "The Definitive Guide" to fragrance that it claims to be. It should have been titled "The Highly Subjective and Personal Opinions of Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez." Do a little bit of research and you'll find that they offer fawning praise to all the work a particular perfumer, while inexplicably tearing apart another. Reading this book, the untutored consumer will believe that all the perfumes by the great old French house of Caron (no affiliation, I don't work for them, I just admire them) have very recently been reformulated and now smell disappointing, terrible, awful. However, I was just at the Caron boutique in New York yesterday, and they smell as wonderful as ever. I even tested them against some of my older samples. No difference. None. Clearly, there's something fishy going on here. The reviews are influenced by something other than the quality of the perfumes themselves.
Not that I would have thought too highly of this book even if it were untainted. The authors' humor was entertaining at first, but after a few dozen pages of it, the constant avalanche of snark became strained. And the tone of the prose is a bit lowbrow for my taste. Example: Dr. Turin's favorite descriptive word seems to be "cr_p." I had such high hopes for this book, but I ended up sending it back. If you do happen to pick it up, take it with a mine-full of salt. And most importantly: Trust your own nose.
 loaded with thorns April 14, 2008
36 out of 49 found this review helpful
More than a few "reviews" made me uncomfortable, and suspicious of the motives and methods of the authors, Luca Turin in particular. There are some pointlessly personal, acid and mean spirited one line dismissals of perfumes and their creators throughout. I came away with a very different impression of Turin than I had before, due to this pervasive nastiness. Although there's plenty of good information and description, it gets ugly in there. I felt like I'd had an awkward dinner with someone I'd once respected, during which I watched them get drunk, vicious and gossipy, and left feeling disgusted. On the whole, it made me think less of his work than of the work he trashed. The 2 stars are for the obviously good information and good, entertaining writing, but overall I find it disappointing.
Worth Buying, But Beware May 9, 2008
33 out of 34 found this review helpful
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 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.
 Buy This Book If You Love Perfume April 14, 2008
30 out of 37 found this review helpful
This is actually the second guide to perfume written by Luca Turin. It is updated and contains his assessments of such recent fragrances as Lush's Karma and Paris Hilton's "work". The essays are excellent, the assessments of the perfumes are spot-on (whether by Sanchez or Turin). It is indeed wonderful to have your memories of the original Arpege stirred up, or to be reminded that we live in a world where Chanel #5 still exists in proper form. I laughed at some of the barbs stuck in a few deserving effluvia, and sighed at Turin's assessment of old favorites which are not so nice any more. The only thing baffling is the star rating which seems to have very little to do with whether the authors liked the perfume; so you can get **** and a bad write up, or ** and a surprisingly merciful one. I don't consider that a big flaw, just a small eccentricity. The writing and points are so well made and this book has zoomed to the top of my charts, and I hope he comes out with an update/addendum sometime in the future where he and Sanchez talk about ones they may have overlooked like Bulgari's The Vert. First class thought, fun, and wisdom.
Olfactory negatives! April 22, 2008
27 out of 50 found this review helpful
For as long as I can recall I have been enamored of perfumes and colognes.
I almost always have at least five or six bottles of scent, which I rotate as I see fit, and am (I blush!) often complemented that the results are enjoyed by family and colleagues (or, even better, complete strangers!).
I picked up PERFUMES: THE GUIDE prmiarily to see how my current favorites, as well as several colognes I've had in the past, were evaluated. I was disappointed that the tart-tongued Turin hadn't anything whatsoever positive to say...
...about any of the fourteen (Yeah. __14__) products I had in mind.
Nor do I consider myself so poorly-directed in the world of fragrance as to doubt my own good taste.
Which makes me wonder about the extreme slant Turin and Sanchez give to several producers of the colognes and perfumes in question, in addition to many others. This is a highly prejudiced "guide" that serves very little in the way of objectivity. Besides which, Turin's notes on several fragrances are nothing short of ultra-BITCHY, which made for unpleasant reading all around, particularly when the reader, unfamliar with the item being excoriated, comes seeking a balanced commentary.
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