"Amouage" By Luca Turin
In fifteen years of fragrance reviewing, I have only accepted one invitation to a proper perfume launch somewhere exotic, and that was for Amouage’s 25th anniversary, about which more below. I should add that I only received one other invitation during that period. It involved spending two days in Portofino covered in cucumber slices, and on day 3 giving a lecture on cucumbers.
The story of Amouage is remarkable. Twenty five years ago an Omani prince decided that his country, renowned since Egyptian times for the quality of its frankincense, home to the unique Green Mountain rose and on whose beaches half the world’s ambergris lands at random, needed a perfume firm that would take on the world’s greatest.
He commissioned the great perfumer Guy Robert and gave him that rarest of all fragrance briefs: an unlimited budget. The result was Gold, a magnificent fragrance based on Oman’s three great raw materials. For a time Amouage Gold was the most expensive fragrance on earth, but in recent years it has become possible to spend a great deal more and get a whole lot less. Later Amouage fragrances were less good, (though Dia for men is a paragon of dry darkness), and the recent Reflections were simply awful. A new art director has taken charge and wants to put Amouage back on track. I had rehearsed a speech exhorting him to hire the orientalist perfumer Bertrand Duchaufour for his next fragrance.
Clearly, Arabs invented luxury: every palace dreams of being the Alhambra, every bedroom a sheikh’s tent and all jewelry aspires to being sold by weight and poured into cupped hands. All else is merely luxury goods, not the real thing. LVMH executives should visit an Omani perfume store. The lead crystal bottles sitting on blue silk in wooden caskets look like presents from a future without moving parts. Half a dozen grades of the amazing rotten oud wood are available for burning. A large bottle on the shelf says "ambergris". Full of the cynical skepticism that comes from spending more than a week in the fragrance industry, I ask to smell it. It is top-class ambergris, and I treat myself to an ounce of raunchy oil.
Later, at a reception under the moon and fireworks, in a crowd peppered with bodyguards bearing silver daggers, we watched Guy Robert showered with applause. Then, like kids leaving a birthday party, we collected a bag with the two new fragrances and could smell them at last. To my relief both were very good. The feminine is a Diorella with tuberose. The masculine is a lovely incense composition, by Bertrand Duchaufour.
December 1, 2007
November 1, 2007
"Dreamjob" By Luca Turin
"Dreamjob" By Luca Turin
Last week I visited two US universities, MIT and Georgetown, to give talks and meet graduate students on their way to molecular biology and chemistry PhDs. On both occasions, I was approached by students (one from Lausanne, one from Beirut) who, very shyly and tentatively, explained to me that their dream was to become perfumers. I was surprised that people who had worked so hard to belong to a scientific elite should actually wish to do something completely different. Nevertheless, they wanted advice, and I gave them some: I tried to talk them out of it. In my opinion, they would be wasted on Britney Spears Incurious Red.
Scientists are not always the most cheerful of people, but as a group I find them less cynical than perfumers, which suggests that they are getting more fun from their profession. Also, I don’t think perfumery is a level playing field, and what the students said confirmed this. They wrote left and right and got no answers. They had both eventually figured out that there is only one proper, open perfumery school on earth, the Isipca in Versailles, but that most of the teaching there is done in French. Other than that, the big five firms have internal schools, but none of their websites has a link that says, “Want to become a perfumer?” Those who train in the internal schools seem to do so in addition to whatever their normal job is, marketing, evaluation, compounding, and learn it as a craft rather than an art or a science.
Imagine if physics were only taught at General Electric, and only after hours. Imagine learning cuisine if there were only five good restaurants on earth. Small wonder so many of the young perfumers are sons and daughters of people in the same profession. That is the surest sign that some talent is being wasted. I asked the great perfumer Françoise Caron once how she had got into it. She explained to me that when she grew up in Grasse, the choice for an adolescent was either to steal motorcycles or to go into perfumery, and she didn’t like bikes. What the world needs is an international school of perfumery where the whole complicated shebang, from art history to chemistry via composition, is taught in English to those who can pay the fees or are sent there on scholarships from perfumery firms. All I ask is to be a member of the jury that awards the prize for Best First Fragrance.
Last week I visited two US universities, MIT and Georgetown, to give talks and meet graduate students on their way to molecular biology and chemistry PhDs. On both occasions, I was approached by students (one from Lausanne, one from Beirut) who, very shyly and tentatively, explained to me that their dream was to become perfumers. I was surprised that people who had worked so hard to belong to a scientific elite should actually wish to do something completely different. Nevertheless, they wanted advice, and I gave them some: I tried to talk them out of it. In my opinion, they would be wasted on Britney Spears Incurious Red.
Scientists are not always the most cheerful of people, but as a group I find them less cynical than perfumers, which suggests that they are getting more fun from their profession. Also, I don’t think perfumery is a level playing field, and what the students said confirmed this. They wrote left and right and got no answers. They had both eventually figured out that there is only one proper, open perfumery school on earth, the Isipca in Versailles, but that most of the teaching there is done in French. Other than that, the big five firms have internal schools, but none of their websites has a link that says, “Want to become a perfumer?” Those who train in the internal schools seem to do so in addition to whatever their normal job is, marketing, evaluation, compounding, and learn it as a craft rather than an art or a science.
Imagine if physics were only taught at General Electric, and only after hours. Imagine learning cuisine if there were only five good restaurants on earth. Small wonder so many of the young perfumers are sons and daughters of people in the same profession. That is the surest sign that some talent is being wasted. I asked the great perfumer Françoise Caron once how she had got into it. She explained to me that when she grew up in Grasse, the choice for an adolescent was either to steal motorcycles or to go into perfumery, and she didn’t like bikes. What the world needs is an international school of perfumery where the whole complicated shebang, from art history to chemistry via composition, is taught in English to those who can pay the fees or are sent there on scholarships from perfumery firms. All I ask is to be a member of the jury that awards the prize for Best First Fragrance.
October 1, 2007
"Eminenences Grises" By Luca Turin
"Eminenences Grises" By Luca Turin
Graham Greene once complained that, having struck it rich with his early novels, he moved to Cap Ferrat only to discover he was the poorest man on the peninsula. Science often works like that: you think you’ve cracked a problem and feel ready to turn on cruise control to coast for a while, when a strange fact comes up, sits at the back of the lecture hall and asks a question that reveals the depth of your ignorance. My day job is to design molecules for fragrances and flavors. I naively thought that if I could come up with something that smells good, is powerful, non-toxic and cheap to make, I would pretty much earn my keep. I was wrong. Time and again, the most experienced perfumers at fragrance firms ask for something completely different and far more mysterious. They want an “effect” material, not a smell.
Effect materials are as old as perfumery itself, and the first such were natural musks. By itself, natural musk has a strange, not particularly strong, not especially pleasant smell of unwashed underwear. But spray it on one wrist and overlay it with a well-known fragrance, and spray the fragrance alone on the other wrist for comparison. The absence of musks is akin to shutting one eye when looking into a 3-D viewer. The scene is the same, but the depth is gone. Other, equally legendary molecules have different effects. Salicylates turn the most banal floral composition into a real perfume, with majestic weight and sweep. Hedione has a magical ability to make things glisten, to fill the spaces between perfume components with a fresh, liquid air. Iso-E Super, long before Julian Schnabel got the idea on canvas, allowed perfumers to paint on black velvet.
But here’s where it gets strange. As it happens, some of these molecules are odorless to some people, including of course perfumers. This is particularly common with salicylates and musks. The perfumer Guy Robert once explained to me that he could not smell benzyl salicylate at all, but could instantly recognize its presence in a perfumery composition. He used a wonderful image: “I recognize it as if it were a friend seen from behind in a crowd, by the cut of his shoulders”. What is going on? Some blind people know that a light is there, even though they can’t see it. Do we have detectors other than those of smell to tell us a chemical is in the air ? What do these molecules have in common? This Rosetta Stone awaits a Champollion, who is probably in year 1 at ETH as I write.
Graham Greene once complained that, having struck it rich with his early novels, he moved to Cap Ferrat only to discover he was the poorest man on the peninsula. Science often works like that: you think you’ve cracked a problem and feel ready to turn on cruise control to coast for a while, when a strange fact comes up, sits at the back of the lecture hall and asks a question that reveals the depth of your ignorance. My day job is to design molecules for fragrances and flavors. I naively thought that if I could come up with something that smells good, is powerful, non-toxic and cheap to make, I would pretty much earn my keep. I was wrong. Time and again, the most experienced perfumers at fragrance firms ask for something completely different and far more mysterious. They want an “effect” material, not a smell.
Effect materials are as old as perfumery itself, and the first such were natural musks. By itself, natural musk has a strange, not particularly strong, not especially pleasant smell of unwashed underwear. But spray it on one wrist and overlay it with a well-known fragrance, and spray the fragrance alone on the other wrist for comparison. The absence of musks is akin to shutting one eye when looking into a 3-D viewer. The scene is the same, but the depth is gone. Other, equally legendary molecules have different effects. Salicylates turn the most banal floral composition into a real perfume, with majestic weight and sweep. Hedione has a magical ability to make things glisten, to fill the spaces between perfume components with a fresh, liquid air. Iso-E Super, long before Julian Schnabel got the idea on canvas, allowed perfumers to paint on black velvet.
But here’s where it gets strange. As it happens, some of these molecules are odorless to some people, including of course perfumers. This is particularly common with salicylates and musks. The perfumer Guy Robert once explained to me that he could not smell benzyl salicylate at all, but could instantly recognize its presence in a perfumery composition. He used a wonderful image: “I recognize it as if it were a friend seen from behind in a crowd, by the cut of his shoulders”. What is going on? Some blind people know that a light is there, even though they can’t see it. Do we have detectors other than those of smell to tell us a chemical is in the air ? What do these molecules have in common? This Rosetta Stone awaits a Champollion, who is probably in year 1 at ETH as I write.
September 1, 2007
"Calone" By Luca Turin
"Calone" By Luca Turin
In August 1966, chemists at the drug giant Pfizer filed a patent for a strange molecule that looked like a tranquilizer (distantly related to Valium) and smelled like nothing on earth, or “melon” as they prosaically described it. Pfizer had bought the venerable Grasse firm of Camilli Albert Laloue two years earlier, so they handed the beast over to their perfumed friends who christened it Calone after the firm’s initials. There it slept for twenty years, while the patent ran out. Then in 1989 perfumer Yves Tanguy understood that the time for watery notes had come and composed New West. Within three years Escape, Kenzo Homme and Eau d’Issey had put Calone at the forefront of perfumery, where it still is. I received an exceptionally pure sample from an Italian manufacturer yesterday. Open the cardboard box, and you smell it already. Open the plastic bag containing the sealed plastic bottle, and you smell it still, but no stronger. Open the bottle, and everyone on the block smells it, but still quiet. This is the olfactory equivalent of a rumour, a whisper that spreads far and wide without ever being spoken out loud. What does it smell of ? No matter: what matters is that it is distance-independent, like light through a transparent medium, like a deity seeing through perfume’s soul.
Synchronicity: I called Mark Buxton, a Symrise perfumer who did many Comme des Garçons fragrances and, almost alone, created the new aesthetic of transparent woody florals that everyone is imitating. I asked him how it all started. He said “Calone”. He hated the smell but loved the effect, that quiet, penetrating radiance. He composed Jacomo’s superbly transparent Anthracite Homme in 1990, and spent the best part of the ‘nineties trying to achieve a midnight version of Calone’s metallic sheen using clear, salubrious, woody-smoky notes and dark flowers. Buxton does not like opaque florals, does not think fragrance has a sex, and clearly has a romantic ideal of perfume: like a revelation, a fragrance should be at once disturbing and self-evident. Rei Kawakubo of CdG picked his composition saying that it was “like a drug: I want more”. Strangely, the Ravel to Buxton’s Debussy works on the same floor: Bertrand Duchaufour, author of Timbuktu and the other great exponent of the Night Sky school. I asked Buxton whether there had been mutual influence. He dismissed this politely, and explained that, in aesthetics as in engineering, problems sometimes have only one solution: they both found it.
In August 1966, chemists at the drug giant Pfizer filed a patent for a strange molecule that looked like a tranquilizer (distantly related to Valium) and smelled like nothing on earth, or “melon” as they prosaically described it. Pfizer had bought the venerable Grasse firm of Camilli Albert Laloue two years earlier, so they handed the beast over to their perfumed friends who christened it Calone after the firm’s initials. There it slept for twenty years, while the patent ran out. Then in 1989 perfumer Yves Tanguy understood that the time for watery notes had come and composed New West. Within three years Escape, Kenzo Homme and Eau d’Issey had put Calone at the forefront of perfumery, where it still is. I received an exceptionally pure sample from an Italian manufacturer yesterday. Open the cardboard box, and you smell it already. Open the plastic bag containing the sealed plastic bottle, and you smell it still, but no stronger. Open the bottle, and everyone on the block smells it, but still quiet. This is the olfactory equivalent of a rumour, a whisper that spreads far and wide without ever being spoken out loud. What does it smell of ? No matter: what matters is that it is distance-independent, like light through a transparent medium, like a deity seeing through perfume’s soul.
Synchronicity: I called Mark Buxton, a Symrise perfumer who did many Comme des Garçons fragrances and, almost alone, created the new aesthetic of transparent woody florals that everyone is imitating. I asked him how it all started. He said “Calone”. He hated the smell but loved the effect, that quiet, penetrating radiance. He composed Jacomo’s superbly transparent Anthracite Homme in 1990, and spent the best part of the ‘nineties trying to achieve a midnight version of Calone’s metallic sheen using clear, salubrious, woody-smoky notes and dark flowers. Buxton does not like opaque florals, does not think fragrance has a sex, and clearly has a romantic ideal of perfume: like a revelation, a fragrance should be at once disturbing and self-evident. Rei Kawakubo of CdG picked his composition saying that it was “like a drug: I want more”. Strangely, the Ravel to Buxton’s Debussy works on the same floor: Bertrand Duchaufour, author of Timbuktu and the other great exponent of the Night Sky school. I asked Buxton whether there had been mutual influence. He dismissed this politely, and explained that, in aesthetics as in engineering, problems sometimes have only one solution: they both found it.
August 1, 2007
"Orange Free State" By Luca Turin
"Orange Free State" By Luca Turin
Good judgment is often little more than the wise exercise of prejudice. Under pressure of time, most of us are scrupulously fair only when given no alternative. André Gide apparently never even opened the parcel containing the manuscript of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, and based his snap rejection on Proust’s unremarkable early works. When I first came across Etat Libre D’Orange, I assumed on the basis of past experience that this niche perfumery firm had all the hallmarks of the classic snob-value ripoff: great names and high concept, crap fragrances. But I’m co-authoring a perfume guide, so I gave them a try.
In fairness to curmudgeons, they do lay it on thick: the perfumes are called Putain des Palaces, Nombril Immense, Don’t get me wrong baby I don’t swallow, etc. Their website is awash with the most hackneyed eroticism of the “no joys without toys” variety, and their motto is “le parfum est mort, vive le parfum”. All this Dada stuff had me betting on the perfumes being either hideous or dull. I had neglected two factors: 1) talented perfumers, especially young ones, have for some time been working for niche brands because it’s more fun; 2) just as important, good artistic directors, tired of working on Britney Spears’ ninth fragrance, are starting their own firms. We now have both Stravinskys and Diaghilevs out there looking for trouble.
Etat Libre d’Orange, clearly a low-fat company, sent twelve of those tiny sample vials that seem designed to prevent the smelling of perfume, with miniature handwritten labels and two postcards with the names of the fragrances. After deciphering the labels and cursing the vials, I started smelling the stuff with an anticipatory scowl. There are few greater pleasures than pessimism disproved. All but two of their fragrances are of a very high level, and the best are the work of two young Givaudan perfumers, Antoine Lie and Antoine Maisondieu. The masterpiece is, in my opinion, Lie’s Sécrétions Magnifiques, helpfully illustrated on the website by a schoolboy drawing of an ejaculating penis. What he has done is revolutionary: he has used a nitrile as a main note in a fine fragrance. In plain language, he has put a loud note of harbor bilge in an elegant floral and made it fly. The list of really bad smells that make good fragrances better was never long: indole and skatole, both naturals, contained in flowers and shit. Now there are three. Mark my words: perfume will never be the same.
Good judgment is often little more than the wise exercise of prejudice. Under pressure of time, most of us are scrupulously fair only when given no alternative. André Gide apparently never even opened the parcel containing the manuscript of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, and based his snap rejection on Proust’s unremarkable early works. When I first came across Etat Libre D’Orange, I assumed on the basis of past experience that this niche perfumery firm had all the hallmarks of the classic snob-value ripoff: great names and high concept, crap fragrances. But I’m co-authoring a perfume guide, so I gave them a try.
In fairness to curmudgeons, they do lay it on thick: the perfumes are called Putain des Palaces, Nombril Immense, Don’t get me wrong baby I don’t swallow, etc. Their website is awash with the most hackneyed eroticism of the “no joys without toys” variety, and their motto is “le parfum est mort, vive le parfum”. All this Dada stuff had me betting on the perfumes being either hideous or dull. I had neglected two factors: 1) talented perfumers, especially young ones, have for some time been working for niche brands because it’s more fun; 2) just as important, good artistic directors, tired of working on Britney Spears’ ninth fragrance, are starting their own firms. We now have both Stravinskys and Diaghilevs out there looking for trouble.
Etat Libre d’Orange, clearly a low-fat company, sent twelve of those tiny sample vials that seem designed to prevent the smelling of perfume, with miniature handwritten labels and two postcards with the names of the fragrances. After deciphering the labels and cursing the vials, I started smelling the stuff with an anticipatory scowl. There are few greater pleasures than pessimism disproved. All but two of their fragrances are of a very high level, and the best are the work of two young Givaudan perfumers, Antoine Lie and Antoine Maisondieu. The masterpiece is, in my opinion, Lie’s Sécrétions Magnifiques, helpfully illustrated on the website by a schoolboy drawing of an ejaculating penis. What he has done is revolutionary: he has used a nitrile as a main note in a fine fragrance. In plain language, he has put a loud note of harbor bilge in an elegant floral and made it fly. The list of really bad smells that make good fragrances better was never long: indole and skatole, both naturals, contained in flowers and shit. Now there are three. Mark my words: perfume will never be the same.
July 1, 2007
"Clean" By Luca Turin
"Clean" By Luca Turin
A clever scientist in charge of improving the smell of clean clothes at a major soap manufacturer explained to me recently that his task was made difficult not just by cost, environmental regulation and the fact that soap powder is already near-perfect, but by a fundamental problem: cleaning fabric essentially means removing oily stuff, and fragrance is oily. Devising a perfume that hangs on to the fabric in the wash like a limpet in a gale is not easy. He summed it up thus: “We take smell out, and then put it back in”. This got me thinking about the fact that we do the same thing every time we take a shower. We wash off the smell and dirt (and, in my opinion, some of our soul, though it seems to grow back), then towel down and spray some smell back on.
But the soaps, shampoos and conditioners you use are not unscented. If they were, they’d smell faintly bad. So it’s really a three-stage process: wash off body smells and stale perfume, replace with a temporary, stand-in fragrance that says “clean”, then cover that with another smell. Note that proper fragrance, like makeup, is unclean. When you pick a shirt and find it stained with face powder or smelling of perfume, it means it’s dirty. At no time was this more true than in the ‘eighties, when fragrances of exceptional power and persistence like Opium, Poison and Giorgio ruled the earth. When the great Issey Miyake decided to make his own fragrance in 1990, he wanted it to smell of water, and by then everyone agreed. His Eau d’Issey was a huge success.
The young today still don’t want to smell dirty like Mom. How do you sell them fragrance? Classic soap fragrance was just scaled down perfume, so just scaling it back up clearly wouldn’t do. Maybe the perfect clean perfume, like those strangely beautiful “average” faces that come from mixing a hundred photographs by computer, might just be the sum total of everything you use when washing. What would that smell like ? Oddly enough, like a soapy fruit salad. Since the early ‘seventies and L’Oréal’s first apple-scented shampoo, fruity notes have invaded the bathroom. The US firm of Bath & Body Works was among the first to see this. They brought out a line of cheap soapy-fruity-floral fragrances a few years back and made a fortune. Now eighty percent of new launches are loud fruity florals. Which means shampoo now smells dirty. Another wash cycle is about to start.
A clever scientist in charge of improving the smell of clean clothes at a major soap manufacturer explained to me recently that his task was made difficult not just by cost, environmental regulation and the fact that soap powder is already near-perfect, but by a fundamental problem: cleaning fabric essentially means removing oily stuff, and fragrance is oily. Devising a perfume that hangs on to the fabric in the wash like a limpet in a gale is not easy. He summed it up thus: “We take smell out, and then put it back in”. This got me thinking about the fact that we do the same thing every time we take a shower. We wash off the smell and dirt (and, in my opinion, some of our soul, though it seems to grow back), then towel down and spray some smell back on.
But the soaps, shampoos and conditioners you use are not unscented. If they were, they’d smell faintly bad. So it’s really a three-stage process: wash off body smells and stale perfume, replace with a temporary, stand-in fragrance that says “clean”, then cover that with another smell. Note that proper fragrance, like makeup, is unclean. When you pick a shirt and find it stained with face powder or smelling of perfume, it means it’s dirty. At no time was this more true than in the ‘eighties, when fragrances of exceptional power and persistence like Opium, Poison and Giorgio ruled the earth. When the great Issey Miyake decided to make his own fragrance in 1990, he wanted it to smell of water, and by then everyone agreed. His Eau d’Issey was a huge success.
The young today still don’t want to smell dirty like Mom. How do you sell them fragrance? Classic soap fragrance was just scaled down perfume, so just scaling it back up clearly wouldn’t do. Maybe the perfect clean perfume, like those strangely beautiful “average” faces that come from mixing a hundred photographs by computer, might just be the sum total of everything you use when washing. What would that smell like ? Oddly enough, like a soapy fruit salad. Since the early ‘seventies and L’Oréal’s first apple-scented shampoo, fruity notes have invaded the bathroom. The US firm of Bath & Body Works was among the first to see this. They brought out a line of cheap soapy-fruity-floral fragrances a few years back and made a fortune. Now eighty percent of new launches are loud fruity florals. Which means shampoo now smells dirty. Another wash cycle is about to start.
June 1, 2007
"Not even wrong" By Luca Turin
"Not even wrong" By Luca Turin
Like a flu that’s been going round and catches up with you just when you thought you dodged it, I finally saw Perfume yesterday. The occasion was a private screening arranged by the Sunday Times to show the movie to four perfume experts and sample their reactions. Two of them were friends I hadn’t seen for ages, and the Times promised champagne and sandwiches, so I agreed to come. It turned out only Evian and no food was on offer. Had there been champagne I would have laughed all the way, instead I grimly clutched my mineral water.
Storyline. The boy develops a fabulous sense of smell because he was born in a fish market. Lucky for him: had he been delivered at a Guerlain store he might have been left anosmic for life. To him smell behaves like sound: he smells a passenger in an approaching carriage from a mile away. I generally feel that if you’re allowed to mess with the laws of physics, you should do something more interesting than flare your nostrils. He grows into an adolescent so gifted he replicates a complex perfume in thirty seconds merely by picking out its ingredients in stoppered bottles and mixing them in the right proportions. Surprisingly, he then asks the owner of the bottles to train him as a perfumer, like the Archangel Gabriel applying for fencing lessons.
He likes the smell of girls, though mysteriously he seems to find it evenly spread on their bodies. No fan of sustainable agriculture, he kills them. They tend to be virgins. By a small leap of logic much beloved of bigots through the ages, the deceased virgins’ smell represents Innocence. Once he has scraped off enough innocence from the young ladies (looked like an eighth of an ounce per virgin, they must have had oily skin) he mixes it all. Instead of smelling like a Moscow bus at rush hour, the mixture causes everyone, from police sergeant to executioner (he has in the meantime been caught) to fall to his knees in adoration.
Mercifully, side effects kick in: the crowd assembled to witness his execution starts tastefully fornicating on the village square. Innocence would never get EU approval: too unstable. The hero empties the rest of the virgin absolute on his head and dies smothered by a crowd trying to get into his knickers. The lights went on. The fourth person present, an Industry Representative, opined that the film gave an accurate idea of the power of fragrance. I left.
Like a flu that’s been going round and catches up with you just when you thought you dodged it, I finally saw Perfume yesterday. The occasion was a private screening arranged by the Sunday Times to show the movie to four perfume experts and sample their reactions. Two of them were friends I hadn’t seen for ages, and the Times promised champagne and sandwiches, so I agreed to come. It turned out only Evian and no food was on offer. Had there been champagne I would have laughed all the way, instead I grimly clutched my mineral water.
Storyline. The boy develops a fabulous sense of smell because he was born in a fish market. Lucky for him: had he been delivered at a Guerlain store he might have been left anosmic for life. To him smell behaves like sound: he smells a passenger in an approaching carriage from a mile away. I generally feel that if you’re allowed to mess with the laws of physics, you should do something more interesting than flare your nostrils. He grows into an adolescent so gifted he replicates a complex perfume in thirty seconds merely by picking out its ingredients in stoppered bottles and mixing them in the right proportions. Surprisingly, he then asks the owner of the bottles to train him as a perfumer, like the Archangel Gabriel applying for fencing lessons.
He likes the smell of girls, though mysteriously he seems to find it evenly spread on their bodies. No fan of sustainable agriculture, he kills them. They tend to be virgins. By a small leap of logic much beloved of bigots through the ages, the deceased virgins’ smell represents Innocence. Once he has scraped off enough innocence from the young ladies (looked like an eighth of an ounce per virgin, they must have had oily skin) he mixes it all. Instead of smelling like a Moscow bus at rush hour, the mixture causes everyone, from police sergeant to executioner (he has in the meantime been caught) to fall to his knees in adoration.
Mercifully, side effects kick in: the crowd assembled to witness his execution starts tastefully fornicating on the village square. Innocence would never get EU approval: too unstable. The hero empties the rest of the virgin absolute on his head and dies smothered by a crowd trying to get into his knickers. The lights went on. The fourth person present, an Industry Representative, opined that the film gave an accurate idea of the power of fragrance. I left.
May 1, 2007
"Reviewer Heaven" By Luca Turin
"Reviewer Heaven" By Luca Turin
Tania Sanchez (my co-author) and I have started work on a perfume guide to come out next year in the US. On the minus side, there are several hundred not-even-wrong fragrances to get through. On the plus side, it is wonderful to get packages containing entire collections all in one go. Firms have a soul, and you need to see it entire to understand it. You then realize that Guerlain, Chanel, Hermès did not get where they are by accident.
Smelling the Guerlain collection shipped fresh from the factory in Orphin, near Paris, was a revelation. Guerlain, like food firms, should put dates on bottles. I had often heard, and never believed, that fragrances made with naturals change a lot in the first six months, as wine does. The family resemblance of fresh Guerlains is even stronger than usual, as if the Guerlinade base that is common to all of them was the first to fade. Some are so rich and complex that we decided to let them sit in a dark room for a few months, till they calm down and pull themselves together.
Another surprise was that some Chanel open secrets came our way. They first sent No. 5 Eau de Parfum, and it smelled completely wrong. I assumed another act of vandalism had taken place and was already planning a “Free the Chanel Five” campaign. Then the Parfum and Eau de Toilette arrived a few days later. After checking with the Chanel engine room, I finally understood that all the while No. 5 was actually three different perfumes: the Parfum is the 1921 original, and smells fresh as paint and unchanged from day 1. The Eau de Toilette is what I thought No. 5 was, all soft and peachy, a fifties mom in a fur coat coming to tuck you in bed before going to the theatre. The Eau de Parfum is, in my opinion, an eighties lapse of judgment.
It’s early days yet, but in six weeks the size of my perfume collection has doubled to about 1400, and the postman rings almost every day with a wry look, hands me a parcel and says wearily “More perfumes for you” as if praying I will soon find an aftershave to my liking. A few days ago came a big parcel from the small but fiercely dedicated Omani firm of Amouage. They make the fabulous Gold, once the most expensive fragrance in the world, for what has now become a reasonable price. The bottles are lead crystal, and the box was almost too heavy to lift. Was there ever a better job?
Tania Sanchez (my co-author) and I have started work on a perfume guide to come out next year in the US. On the minus side, there are several hundred not-even-wrong fragrances to get through. On the plus side, it is wonderful to get packages containing entire collections all in one go. Firms have a soul, and you need to see it entire to understand it. You then realize that Guerlain, Chanel, Hermès did not get where they are by accident.
Smelling the Guerlain collection shipped fresh from the factory in Orphin, near Paris, was a revelation. Guerlain, like food firms, should put dates on bottles. I had often heard, and never believed, that fragrances made with naturals change a lot in the first six months, as wine does. The family resemblance of fresh Guerlains is even stronger than usual, as if the Guerlinade base that is common to all of them was the first to fade. Some are so rich and complex that we decided to let them sit in a dark room for a few months, till they calm down and pull themselves together.
Another surprise was that some Chanel open secrets came our way. They first sent No. 5 Eau de Parfum, and it smelled completely wrong. I assumed another act of vandalism had taken place and was already planning a “Free the Chanel Five” campaign. Then the Parfum and Eau de Toilette arrived a few days later. After checking with the Chanel engine room, I finally understood that all the while No. 5 was actually three different perfumes: the Parfum is the 1921 original, and smells fresh as paint and unchanged from day 1. The Eau de Toilette is what I thought No. 5 was, all soft and peachy, a fifties mom in a fur coat coming to tuck you in bed before going to the theatre. The Eau de Parfum is, in my opinion, an eighties lapse of judgment.
It’s early days yet, but in six weeks the size of my perfume collection has doubled to about 1400, and the postman rings almost every day with a wry look, hands me a parcel and says wearily “More perfumes for you” as if praying I will soon find an aftershave to my liking. A few days ago came a big parcel from the small but fiercely dedicated Omani firm of Amouage. They make the fabulous Gold, once the most expensive fragrance in the world, for what has now become a reasonable price. The bottles are lead crystal, and the box was almost too heavy to lift. Was there ever a better job?
April 1, 2007
"Due Credit" By Luca Turin
"Due Credit" By Luca Turin
Faithful readers will remember that in the Nov 2004 Duftnote I wrote that Guerlain was preparing to reformulate several of its perfumes, most notably Mitsouko (1919), probably the best perfume on this earth. Mitsouko and all other fragrances derived from the legendary Chypre (Coty 1917) contain three basic ingredients, namely bergamot, labdanum and oakmoss. The problem was that oakmoss was thought to contain “resin acids”, and these are sensitizers. With repeated exposure a very few people can develop a nasty skin response to the stuff.
The place where you find the most resin acids is the rosin used by violinists to give friction to the bow. Allergies can be added to their long list of sufferings among which neck abrasions, poor posture, wearing ill-fitting black clothes and having to play Alban Berg’s Concerto. Much smaller amounts of resin acids are contained in perfume. But now that most real dangers (cholera, Russian tanks) are gone, EU politicians have found that several small fears can propel careers as nicely as one big one, and have been regulating all the horrible chemicals in our lives.
The fun part was that by the time the EU got round to restricting oakmoss, it turned out that the culprit was the cheaper tree moss with which it was frequently adulterated. But reversing legislation is as hard as putting toothpaste back in the tube, and perfumers had to work with the rules. Guerlain appears to have initially taken a typically LVMH approach, i.e. do a quick-fix replacement in the hope that nobody would notice, on the principle that if the CEO can’t tell the difference who the hell is going to disagree? But a lot of people were upset by the news, including some NZZ readers who wrote to Guerlain and got blah-blah answers back. Guerlain got very angry and quietly hired a young guy to do the dirty deed.
Then some in-house people refused to mess with the formula and walked out, at which point Guerlain brought in the great Edouard Fléchier to fix the problem. He appears to have worked on it for a couple of years. Two days ago I got the new stuff, and it gives me great pleasure to report that Fléchier has done the impossible. The new Mitsouko conforms to all the rules and smells sensational, ever so slightly different, more bread-like up top, a touch less sweet below and with a slightly stronger iris note in the middle. If I had to choose between the old and the new, regardless of habit, I might pick the new. Bravo.
Faithful readers will remember that in the Nov 2004 Duftnote I wrote that Guerlain was preparing to reformulate several of its perfumes, most notably Mitsouko (1919), probably the best perfume on this earth. Mitsouko and all other fragrances derived from the legendary Chypre (Coty 1917) contain three basic ingredients, namely bergamot, labdanum and oakmoss. The problem was that oakmoss was thought to contain “resin acids”, and these are sensitizers. With repeated exposure a very few people can develop a nasty skin response to the stuff.
The place where you find the most resin acids is the rosin used by violinists to give friction to the bow. Allergies can be added to their long list of sufferings among which neck abrasions, poor posture, wearing ill-fitting black clothes and having to play Alban Berg’s Concerto. Much smaller amounts of resin acids are contained in perfume. But now that most real dangers (cholera, Russian tanks) are gone, EU politicians have found that several small fears can propel careers as nicely as one big one, and have been regulating all the horrible chemicals in our lives.
The fun part was that by the time the EU got round to restricting oakmoss, it turned out that the culprit was the cheaper tree moss with which it was frequently adulterated. But reversing legislation is as hard as putting toothpaste back in the tube, and perfumers had to work with the rules. Guerlain appears to have initially taken a typically LVMH approach, i.e. do a quick-fix replacement in the hope that nobody would notice, on the principle that if the CEO can’t tell the difference who the hell is going to disagree? But a lot of people were upset by the news, including some NZZ readers who wrote to Guerlain and got blah-blah answers back. Guerlain got very angry and quietly hired a young guy to do the dirty deed.
Then some in-house people refused to mess with the formula and walked out, at which point Guerlain brought in the great Edouard Fléchier to fix the problem. He appears to have worked on it for a couple of years. Two days ago I got the new stuff, and it gives me great pleasure to report that Fléchier has done the impossible. The new Mitsouko conforms to all the rules and smells sensational, ever so slightly different, more bread-like up top, a touch less sweet below and with a slightly stronger iris note in the middle. If I had to choose between the old and the new, regardless of habit, I might pick the new. Bravo.
March 1, 2007
"The One" By Luca Turin
"The One" By Luca Turin
While flying for the price of a beer from London to a quiet Italian airport recently, I noticed that the flight attendant was wafting a pleasant, slightly bland fragrance all the way down the aisle. Two hundred nautical miles later I figured out what it was. The trick never fails: 1- Hmm, that’s nice ! 2-What the hell is it ? 3-(belatedly) CK One ! On the return flight, I sprayed some on at the duty-free and marveled at this piece of quiet genius. CK One is not so much a perfume as a chemical time machine. Most fragrances happily operate on a logarithmic time scale, each successive phase occupying a span ten times longer than the previous one: six minutes of topnotes, an hour of heart, and the rest of the day for drydown. A lot of interesting things can happen during scene changes, for example in the first half-hour of Patou’s EnJoy or the first three of Guerlain’s Insolence. Some fragrances manage time differently, by fading seamlessly from one accord to another, similar one, for hours on end, as, for example, in J’Adore or DK Gold. But cKOne takes a different tack, by stopping time altogether. In the Eighties, this used to be called linear perfumery, and was usually applied to big-hair contraptions that, alas, froze the clock at 11 on a Saturday night. The rest of the time, they worked like heels and a gold lamé dress on the morning train to work. Instead, CK One takes a soapy, fresh topnote and fleshes it out with a skin-toned ensemble of middle and drydown materials. Every one is picked for its radiance, so the chord can then be heard just as clearly thirty paces away as up close. Something then instructs the all the components of CK One to hold hands and fly off in formation. Because of this, the mix in the air is unvarying, and time forever stands still at 8AM: the frozen morning of a day full of promise. There is a similar case of brilliant, maybe fortuitous chemical engineering, this time in flavors. An expert told me that the secret of Coca Cola resided, not, as many people think, in some magic ingredient, but in the fact that while the chemical composition of the flavor changes wildly between mixing in Atlanta and sipping in Bangalore six months later, the taste itself does not budge. Could it be that the chemical key to glory for both Coke and CK One, the whispered message our nose loves to hear, is the same: Stay Young Forever ?
While flying for the price of a beer from London to a quiet Italian airport recently, I noticed that the flight attendant was wafting a pleasant, slightly bland fragrance all the way down the aisle. Two hundred nautical miles later I figured out what it was. The trick never fails: 1- Hmm, that’s nice ! 2-What the hell is it ? 3-(belatedly) CK One ! On the return flight, I sprayed some on at the duty-free and marveled at this piece of quiet genius. CK One is not so much a perfume as a chemical time machine. Most fragrances happily operate on a logarithmic time scale, each successive phase occupying a span ten times longer than the previous one: six minutes of topnotes, an hour of heart, and the rest of the day for drydown. A lot of interesting things can happen during scene changes, for example in the first half-hour of Patou’s EnJoy or the first three of Guerlain’s Insolence. Some fragrances manage time differently, by fading seamlessly from one accord to another, similar one, for hours on end, as, for example, in J’Adore or DK Gold. But cKOne takes a different tack, by stopping time altogether. In the Eighties, this used to be called linear perfumery, and was usually applied to big-hair contraptions that, alas, froze the clock at 11 on a Saturday night. The rest of the time, they worked like heels and a gold lamé dress on the morning train to work. Instead, CK One takes a soapy, fresh topnote and fleshes it out with a skin-toned ensemble of middle and drydown materials. Every one is picked for its radiance, so the chord can then be heard just as clearly thirty paces away as up close. Something then instructs the all the components of CK One to hold hands and fly off in formation. Because of this, the mix in the air is unvarying, and time forever stands still at 8AM: the frozen morning of a day full of promise. There is a similar case of brilliant, maybe fortuitous chemical engineering, this time in flavors. An expert told me that the secret of Coca Cola resided, not, as many people think, in some magic ingredient, but in the fact that while the chemical composition of the flavor changes wildly between mixing in Atlanta and sipping in Bangalore six months later, the taste itself does not budge. Could it be that the chemical key to glory for both Coke and CK One, the whispered message our nose loves to hear, is the same: Stay Young Forever ?
February 1, 2007
"Chanel Six" By Luca Turin
"Chanel Six" By Luca Turin
There has been a change of plans. The world will not end just yet. Some weeks ago, after two long conversations with normally stoic perfumers, I had concluded that great perfumery was essentially over and I might as well take up Tuvan throat singing as my next hobby. Picture this: Serious perfumes used to take at least a year to compose. For major brands, that time is now typically down to three months. Small wonder the greatest perfumers now do unpaid niche work to put a little fun back into their lives.
Then came a divine surprise: Chanel sent me an embarrassingly luxurious package containing six fragrances to be added to their boutique line. I had no idea what to expect. Recently, Chanel’s successes (Chance, Allure Sensuelle) were a bit like Apple’s iPod: nice earners but nothing revolutionary. While Guerlain and Hermès did confidential lines of fragrances, Chanel held back. But then I thought it typical of a perfectionist family firm to take its time over such things. I had also heard that the brilliant Chris Sheldrake, the nose behind Serge Lutens’s perfumes, had joined Jacques Polge at Chanel. I wondered what was brewing.
As I quickly went through the package, my mood broke through the clouds, going from overcast to what aviators call "severe clear" in minutes. In my opinion, these six permanently change the landscape of perfumery by proving that there is, after all, a modern Grand Manner. They are Coromandel, a soft patchouli in the style of Lutens’s Borneo 1834, but more refined; No. 18, an iris-rose that sits next to the defunct Iris Gris in heaven; 28 La Pausa, an iris-violet named after a house Coco Chanel owned; Bel Respiro, a fresh-aldehydic named for another house; and an Eau de Cologne that goes straight to the top of its class.
Every one of these is as good as it gets, but one gave me an emotion I hadn’t felt for years. It was the thrill of feminine beauty, the pang of pain and longing you get in Rear Window when Grace Kelly breezes in, throws her coat on a chair and saunters over to give James Stewart a kiss. It is 31 Rue Cambon, after Chanel’s Paris address, and the best Chypre in thirty years. With current perfumery restrictions on oakmoss, a new great Chypre had seemed impossible. Remarkably, Chanel used a pepper-iris accord instead to achieve a classical effect in a completely novel way. If you only have room for six perfumes in your life, clear your shelf.
There has been a change of plans. The world will not end just yet. Some weeks ago, after two long conversations with normally stoic perfumers, I had concluded that great perfumery was essentially over and I might as well take up Tuvan throat singing as my next hobby. Picture this: Serious perfumes used to take at least a year to compose. For major brands, that time is now typically down to three months. Small wonder the greatest perfumers now do unpaid niche work to put a little fun back into their lives.
Then came a divine surprise: Chanel sent me an embarrassingly luxurious package containing six fragrances to be added to their boutique line. I had no idea what to expect. Recently, Chanel’s successes (Chance, Allure Sensuelle) were a bit like Apple’s iPod: nice earners but nothing revolutionary. While Guerlain and Hermès did confidential lines of fragrances, Chanel held back. But then I thought it typical of a perfectionist family firm to take its time over such things. I had also heard that the brilliant Chris Sheldrake, the nose behind Serge Lutens’s perfumes, had joined Jacques Polge at Chanel. I wondered what was brewing.
As I quickly went through the package, my mood broke through the clouds, going from overcast to what aviators call "severe clear" in minutes. In my opinion, these six permanently change the landscape of perfumery by proving that there is, after all, a modern Grand Manner. They are Coromandel, a soft patchouli in the style of Lutens’s Borneo 1834, but more refined; No. 18, an iris-rose that sits next to the defunct Iris Gris in heaven; 28 La Pausa, an iris-violet named after a house Coco Chanel owned; Bel Respiro, a fresh-aldehydic named for another house; and an Eau de Cologne that goes straight to the top of its class.
Every one of these is as good as it gets, but one gave me an emotion I hadn’t felt for years. It was the thrill of feminine beauty, the pang of pain and longing you get in Rear Window when Grace Kelly breezes in, throws her coat on a chair and saunters over to give James Stewart a kiss. It is 31 Rue Cambon, after Chanel’s Paris address, and the best Chypre in thirty years. With current perfumery restrictions on oakmoss, a new great Chypre had seemed impossible. Remarkably, Chanel used a pepper-iris accord instead to achieve a classical effect in a completely novel way. If you only have room for six perfumes in your life, clear your shelf.
January 1, 2007
"Perfume’s perfumes" By Luca Turin
"Perfume’s perfumes" By Luca Turin
I’ll start with an admission: I couldn’t finish Patrick Suskind’s book, and won’t see the movie until they show it on airplanes and I’m stuck in 44F. The sex-drugs-and-minuet thing bores me. However, one good thing came my way when the film was released: a limited-edition red plush boxed set from Thierry Mugler. Ah, the joys of being a perfume critic ! It retails for €550 and I get to play with it for free. It contains fifteen fragrances composed by "The Christophs", Laudamiel and Hornetz, illustrative of various scenes in the movie. They both work for the great fragrance composition firm IFF, and this was clearly a labor of love (they pitched it to the filmmaker, not the other way round) as well a couple of years’ work.
Laudamiel’s style is so distinctive I knew some of this was his work even before I looked at the beautiful website. What he excels at is bold, steely, transparent accords that feel like architect sketches for a penthouse flat flying in earth orbit. One third of the fragrances in the box are in this manner. Another third are lavish, classical set-pieces in period dress, all of them good. The remaining third are literal depictions, the best being a cobbler’s shop (Atelier Grimal), a wonderful, bitter leather accord, and another, depressingly entitled Human Existence, which contains the biggest, most fecal dose of civet in living memory . The centrepiece of the boxed set is a fragrance called Aura. There is nothing sketchy about this one, a melancholy milky-powdery heliotrope note reminiscent of Guerlain’s Après L’Ondée. Aura is the only one that will be sold separately, and apparently is to be used in conjunction with other fragrances, though it smells fine to me as is.
Who will buy this thing ? I would, for the sheer fun of it. Every year, at my children’s school, I do a two-hour presentation to the 6-year-olds explaining what perfume is about. Usually I cobble together bottles of raw materials, but next time I’ll just bring the red box. The range of abstract and real, old and new is a perfect showcase of what makes modern perfumery exciting, from strange and powerful synthetics to exotic, top-flight naturals. But there’s another reason to shell out: the bottle labelled Salon Rouge contains the most vertiginously beautiful accord I’ve smelled in years, supposedly made of davana fruit and sandalwood. If I could play the game in reverse and choose the film scene it illustrates, it would be Harold Lloyd dangling from the hands of a huge clock twenty floors up.
I’ll start with an admission: I couldn’t finish Patrick Suskind’s book, and won’t see the movie until they show it on airplanes and I’m stuck in 44F. The sex-drugs-and-minuet thing bores me. However, one good thing came my way when the film was released: a limited-edition red plush boxed set from Thierry Mugler. Ah, the joys of being a perfume critic ! It retails for €550 and I get to play with it for free. It contains fifteen fragrances composed by "The Christophs", Laudamiel and Hornetz, illustrative of various scenes in the movie. They both work for the great fragrance composition firm IFF, and this was clearly a labor of love (they pitched it to the filmmaker, not the other way round) as well a couple of years’ work.
Laudamiel’s style is so distinctive I knew some of this was his work even before I looked at the beautiful website. What he excels at is bold, steely, transparent accords that feel like architect sketches for a penthouse flat flying in earth orbit. One third of the fragrances in the box are in this manner. Another third are lavish, classical set-pieces in period dress, all of them good. The remaining third are literal depictions, the best being a cobbler’s shop (Atelier Grimal), a wonderful, bitter leather accord, and another, depressingly entitled Human Existence, which contains the biggest, most fecal dose of civet in living memory . The centrepiece of the boxed set is a fragrance called Aura. There is nothing sketchy about this one, a melancholy milky-powdery heliotrope note reminiscent of Guerlain’s Après L’Ondée. Aura is the only one that will be sold separately, and apparently is to be used in conjunction with other fragrances, though it smells fine to me as is.
Who will buy this thing ? I would, for the sheer fun of it. Every year, at my children’s school, I do a two-hour presentation to the 6-year-olds explaining what perfume is about. Usually I cobble together bottles of raw materials, but next time I’ll just bring the red box. The range of abstract and real, old and new is a perfect showcase of what makes modern perfumery exciting, from strange and powerful synthetics to exotic, top-flight naturals. But there’s another reason to shell out: the bottle labelled Salon Rouge contains the most vertiginously beautiful accord I’ve smelled in years, supposedly made of davana fruit and sandalwood. If I could play the game in reverse and choose the film scene it illustrates, it would be Harold Lloyd dangling from the hands of a huge clock twenty floors up.
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