Perfumes: The Guide | 
| 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: 7219
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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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...
 Only a scratch-n-sniff section could have made this book better... July 18, 2008
Isn't the first movement of Brahm's 2nd Symphony in D Major the most melodic symphony ever written? Or would it be the Friar Lorenzo movement of Prokofieff's Romeo and Juliet? Or Tschaikowsky's 1st Piano Concerto?
To the naive listener, a music critic's judgement and description would be helpful. To the urbane listener, such critique is interesting. Often critics will discern something that the casual listener has missed. It is why we need thoughtful, experienced, educated critics. Not because we always agree with them, but because they inform the debate.
And so it is with "Perfumes - The Guide". The authors perform a stupendous service in reviewing hundreds of scents in lively detail. For the reader who is new to perfume (or has simply used what his parents used), this book is a must for the reference shelf. Eventually, the reader will have a significant other and run out of gift ideas: have this book at hand. There is no other similar compendium available. And while the authors have strong biases (good for them!), they are, at least. their own norm. The book is called a "guide"; it is not called "the RULES". All such compendia have biases, if only what is included and what is left out.
The brief descriptions and ratings of perfumes are extremely helpful, but only perhaps if you have some experience with some of the scents. Fortunately, expense is not one of the authors' biases. I have used Tabac for years and it is very cheap. Dr. Turin rates is highly (4 out of 5). And I must confess, that I agreed with most of his choices for men's colognes (Eau Savage, Guerlain's Imperiale, Homme Dior), so perhaps I am favorably inclined toward this book. But, like the authors, I have been sampling scents for over 40 years, so I was able to conjure up the smells as they described them. This would be a distinct advantage in reading this book.
If you have never been to a symphony hall, you will not recognize the description of the music when reading the review in the morning paper. Similarly, if you are new to perfumes, it will be difficult to understand some of the terminology. That noted, the rating guide serves as a good filter to avoid expensive mistakes. If you just noted the 4 and 5 star perfumes and made a point to experiment with them, you will connect the terms to the scents pretty quickly. A middle C on a timpani and a piano are the same note, but reading about them does not demonstrate the difference in sounds. And so it is with scents. This book will help guide you through the amazing variety of them.
Oh, So Delicious... July 15, 2008
This book was a secret vice to me, almost like sneaking exotic candy behind doors, so you will have to share with no one else. I don't know any of the scientific babble; I only know I love beautiful smells. The mechanics of them leave me cold, frankly. But...this book was so compelling, and pure fun to read--of course I hurriedly looked up all my favorite scents first, to see how they were rated. I was thrilled to see some of my favorites with 4 or 5 stars, but nearly reduced to tears (!) to see one of my all-time favorites garner not only a 1, but jeering derision as well. I felt personally stung...but no matter, the reading of the whole thing was still a garden of delight. I actually wrote Luca and Tania a 'fan letter', and I will include some of it here: "...due to life-long financial difficulties, I've never been able to access much in the way of expensive perfumes...but your book was the 'unbreak my heart' key to my unrequited love of perfume. I could not embrace my own affair, but I got to look through a peephole at the avid lovers. What a feast! Your lyrical, outrageous, hysterical, insane descriptions spoke to my soul like David's harp--I could almost smell them vicariously...." I did find a website that sells "minis" and I picked out the ten most delectable scents in the book (to me, by description) and ordered them. What a banquet of riches. I am still caught up in smelling them all and deciding daily what I shall wear...oh, heaven! And I also discovered what will always be my 'signature scent' from this day forward--Tocade. Sweet dreams, perfume lovers.
 Save your money June 18, 2008
0 out of 4 found this review helpful
Tentoone's excellent review says it all about this book. I bought it. I read it. I should not have bothered. Go to an online perfume sales company and read the buyer reviews. It's free and more useful in judging the perfumes. This book is a collection of this married couple's personal opinions. Ho Hum.
Smell Those Sparkling Top Notes! June 5, 2008
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
This is a delightful and truly fascinating book. My husband and I took turns reading it aloud (he said, "It's like wine, isn't it?") and it even got him interested in one of the five-star Masterpiece feminines-to-be-worn-as-masculines. The idea of smelling like a Vietnamese beef-mint salad ("Diorella") is just too appealing for him... Myself, I'm tickled by the fact that "Stetson" is a heady feminine floral oriental (in a box bearing a photo of a rumpled Tom Brady in shearling) and "Anais Anais" (pitched to lissome teenage girls in the late '70's) is dry enough to be a suitable masculine. Turin and Sanchez's enthusiasm for this little-explored subject is contagious and they are not total snobs -- they like "Vanilla Fields" better than "Lalique", "Lady Stetson" better than "Chanel No. 22," "Old Spice" better than "Polo Black." Their writing is witty, erudite, and downright Nabokovian when they are sufficiently moved to wax eloquent about a Masterpiece. Be prepared to take an immediate trip to the mall (as I did, bearing a little notepad with all the interesting scents with pithy tags like "hot rubber" and "cilantro floral") and get a headache from sniffin' all the stuff. This book made me seek out scents from the past that I would have otherwise avoided, like Estee Lauder's "Knowing", Dior's "Dune", and Clinique's "Aromatic Elixer" (all 80's Masterpieces which deserve a second chance), and venture into the new world of artisanal fragrance. I ended up exchanging phone numbers with the perfume lady at Barney's after an intense 20 minute powwow with Le Labo and Lutens. And at Neiman's, I experienced the divine confluence of Chanel's "Cuir De Russie" on my right arm and Serge Luten's "Five O'Clock Au Gingembre" on my left, both of which lingered deliciously all night long. What fun! And I'm someone who formerly was fine with a drop or two of lavender oil here and there... My only complaints are for the lack of a proper index and I'd like to know what these guys think of the popular thing of mixing and layering different scents (such as a client of mine who smelled like a luxurious Lutens-something which was the result of "CK One" and patchouli oil *yikes!*). Does it ever work and if so, how and with what? And okay, yeah, I can see how someone could be a little miffed if these guys dismissed their personal favorite as "total crap." I am by no means in agreement with all of their recommendations (you couldn't pay me enough to wear a Masterpiece like "Opium") but still they seem to know what they're talking about... so I'm looking forward to Volume 2 for all the rest (like Roget and Gallet's "Lotus Bleu", Aveda "Love", "Kai", Caudelie's "Eau du Vigne",etc).
Exquisite glimpses into the world of scent June 2, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
This book is a delight to read. Both writers know thier stuff and make a convincing case for taking perfumes seriously, and when not to take them so seriously! They are lyrical when reviewing masterpieces, and deliciously catty when confronted with a dud.
I will certainly take this book with me next time I go to the perfume counter.
I would have liked some more comprehensive indexing, and it would have been handy to group perfumes by type, rather than strict alphabetical order.
Apart from that this is both an essential reference guide for getting exactly what you want in a perfume purchase, and a pleasure to read in and of itself.
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