Perfumes: The Guide | 
| Authors: Luca Turin, Tania Sanchez
Publisher: Viking Adult
Category: Book
List Price: $27.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  43 reviews
Sales Rank: 898
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.
Product 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 worlds most elegant and beautifulas well as some truly terribleperfumes. 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 womens and mens 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?
Whats 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 Parkers books have done for wine. Beautifully designed and elegantly illustrated, this book will be the perfect gift for collectors and anyone whos ever had an interest in the fascinating subject of perfume.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 38 more reviews...
 Puff piece masquerading as a serious guide. May 11, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Disappointing. Completely mis-named as "The Guide". Inconsistent in the treatment of each of the perfumes -- some so called reviews are 2 pages long, while others are one sentence. Star reviews do not match up with the comments made, e.g Chanel Coco Mademoiselle.
Considering Luca Turin's well publicised experience with the fragrance industry, I was expecting a series of balanced analyses of perfumes on the market -- instead the "reviews" are biased towards some brands or perfumers and rely more catchphrases and name dropping.
Sure, at times I agreed with the star rating of say, Ange ou Demon (one star), but reading the comments was like watching someone pull the wings off of flies. Mean spirited and cringeworthy.
Would have been more helpful if they'd actually gone into what was wrong/right with the fragrances....e.g "The lemon/herbal clashed with the sweet vanillic base note." Instead of going on about cough syrup and how many coats of paint a ferrari needs.
I would not be using this to choose (or avoid) my next perfume. Opinionated schlock which is useless as a guide.
 not perfect but wonderful May 11, 2008
I got an e-mail from Amazon (not that it's personal) to write a review of this book. After looking over the others, I don't really see what I can add, but here's my four cents:
1. It's a bit sad to me that folks are so insecure. So what if Turin and Sachez have a different opinion than you? I have heard people say they were devastated that The Guide doesn't say "their scent" is great. It doesn't say some of my favorites are either, and I could care less.
2. Why is everyone saying it's bitchy? Yes, it's scathing, but it's not bitchy. There's a world of difference. Turin and Sanchez love scent and this comes through. They are having fun, I would imagine. And what do we do when we're having fun? Make jokes. Overstate. No, it's not bitchy, for it's never mean just for the sake of it.
3. These folks are professionals in their field. Dr. Turin designs new scent molecules. It is no wonder that they both go for the unusual and even the unwearable. The vast majority of the mid-scale department store scents smell the same: how would you like it if you had to test these on a regular basis? I'm sure your taste, too, would become more refined and gravitate to more bang than, say, yet another quiet white floral.
4. Folks, have some faith in your own opinions and just enjoy. The bottom line is this: this book is a great deal of fun. If you're looking for a list of ingrediants, google it.
 Worth Buying, But Beware May 9, 2008
2 out of 2 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.
I worship at the temple of fragrance May 8, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I don't just like fragrance, I am OBSESSED with it. Portioning part of my monthly income to one or two fragrances, spending the majority of my time on the computer on fragrance blogs and sites. That said, I don't believe you have to be a fragrance fanatic to enjoy this book. I do think, however, that you need a thicker skin than some people who have found themselves offended by this book for some reason. Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez have both high praise as well as blaring scorn for some of my favorite fragrances. This does not bother me a whit. I have immense respect for Turin and Sanchez but I also understand they are critics. They are more than entitled to their opinions, especially considering their knowledge and expertise in the industry. I am delighted that they have come out with this (mostly) comprehensive book of perfume reviews. I have been waiting for something like this since I really became involved with fragrance as a teenager. And that they have actually made this witty and fun to read as well as useful is a bonus.
The only reasons I give this four stars are as follows: 1) I find the star rating system a bit confusing compared to the reviews (as others have stated) - but I believe they mean to give stars according to the technical feats achieved in the making of the perfume. The review is more informative and useful than the rating. But follow whatever method seems to work for you. 2) I do wish they had included the notes with each review. I know perfumers dimiss the pyramid of top, middle and base notes, but it is helpful to us laypersons. (I'm sure this would have made the book twice as long.) 3) I know this is really too much to ask for, but I also wish discontinued fragrances could have been included as well. That is another book entirely, which I hope will be forthcoming!
A thoroughly entertaining and informative read. I will keep a copy in my handbag at all times now.
 Very Opinionated May 8, 2008
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
Smell is a highly individualistic sense. Humans, unfortunately, have a very poor sense of smell, and some people perceive certain scents in an entirely different way than others do. What smells good to one person may smell terrible to another. The authors gave rave reviews to Bandit and Angel, two fragrances which I consider to be among the most vile ever created, and gave bad reviews to many of my favorites. The book, however, is written in an amusing fashion and can be informative as long as you keep in mind that these are opinions.
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