Fancy a bit of Eau de Bilge? How about essence of unwashed hair? Or even dirty tampon... Maverick perfume experts Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez reviewed 1 500 fragrances and the industry is not happy with them
Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez are amazed when I tell them that I rushed straight to Liberty and bought a bottle of Miller Harris's L'Air de Rien on their recommendation.
The fragrance, created for Jane Birkin, gets four stars out of five in their monumental new book Perfumes: the Guide. Think of it as the essence of the film Performance: a sort of incense and blocked-loos pong.
"A cross between a latrine and a church," laughs the burly, bearded Turin, who nevertheless "loves it". "Stale joss-sticks and underpants," shudders the petite Sanchez. "It's nasty!"
In page after page of wonderful, evocative, poetic prose, Turin and Sanchez assess almost 1 500 perfumes in a way that will get the most diffident sniffer salivating - and often laughing.
"Dear Cartier, take note: this upstart panty firm just had your Baiser du Dragon for lunch," is the verdict on Agent Provocateur's Strip. "Avoid this one, unless you're dating Piltdown Man," is the advice with Chanel's Chance. And you wonder what poor Michael Kors did to deserve this: "Shrieking hair-singeing horror, probably first rejected for use in industrial drain cleaner."
No wonder the guide is already creating tsunamis of irritation in the placid waters of the perfume industry, where up till now criticism has been non-existent.
I suggested that we photograph Turin and Sanchez at Liberty's perfume hall, but the store's PR turned us down flat. That book will stop people buying perfume, we were told snootily.
"What a bunch of idiots. Had they read it?" snaps Turin.
"People are sending us letters saying, 'I'm spending the grocery money on perfume, thanks to you!'" says Sanchez.
"Any notion that a guide is going to decrease sales is utter nonsense," adds Turin.
Even getting manufacturers to send samples was a headache. Turin, who was brought up in France, "got a weekly release of aggression" ringing up those "terrible snobs", the PRs of French perfume houses.
"Houses such as Guerlain are beginning to get it," concedes Turin. "They hate my guts, but they know I can get them in the store. Perfumes are public domain, so they might as well get me in a good mood as have me trudge to Harrods in driving rain."
The day the entire Guerlain range arrived in a giant box was the day the pair danced and sang around the kitchen, says Sanchez.
But hang on a minute: how can Guerlain hate Turin's guts? If his rapturous, five-star appreciation doesn't get you to drop £60-plus on their heavenly Après L'Ondee, your soul is dead inside.
"Guerlain are extremely happy about the fact that I say Mitsouko is the greatest ever, and extremely upset that I said L'Instant was crap," he says. "And they can't understand that what makes one comment believable is the existence of the other one! They're like the Soviet Communist Party in '79. If you have anything short of unanimous praise, it's perceived as lèse-majeste."
"Somebody must be shot!" quips Sanchez.
The perfume houses should be begging this dynamic duo to come and work for them, but I suspect the pair value their independence too much. They met online while California-born Sanchez was living in New York and Turin was based in London. Sanchez was a keen perfume blogger, and had come across a book about Turin, The Emperor of Scent, which included some of his French perfume reviews translated into English.
"I know you're going to kick me under the table," says Sanchez, "but Luca's writing on perfume was a revelation, because it was metaphorical without being cloying. This stuff was visceral, it was new, and it conveyed the sensation you got from smelling a fragrance much better than anything else I'd ever read.
"Perfume bloggers are a terribly erudite bunch, they drink wine and travel... we were all blogging about perfume and then Luca pops up! And his blog is a cut above everyone else's because he's 10 times smarter than anyone else, he's got five brains..."
"This is off the record," says Turin modestly.
"...four of which are devoted to aeroplanes. So I went on his blog and wrote a comment, and he wrote back, and this is how we met."
"I invited Tania and all the other friends off the blog to a nice lunch in New York. Incidentally, we were both married..."
"There's this salacious angle, because now we're married to each other! Scandal in the perfume world!"
They delivered their manuscript, a labour of love in more than one sense, in November 2007 and, says Sanchez, "ran to City Hall" to get hitched immediately afterwards.
I don't doubt the five brains bit. Turin was born in Beirut of Argentinian and Italian parents, but moved to France at the age of one. French is his native tongue, but his American-accented English is flawless ("You should hear his Italian," sighs Sanchez).
"I don't consider myself a particularly olfactory person," says Turin simply, "but perfumes speak to me. I'm a scientist, a biophysicist, and did work on the mechanism of smell. My comfort zone is intense nerdiness."
Sanchez, in contrast, an English major, approached perfumes as legible texts to be assessed in lit-crit terms, citing the lush high-Victorian Walter Pater as a crucial influence.
One theme that comes out strongly through the book is their desire to mix up the world of masculine and feminine fragrances. Sanchez happily wears the great male fragrances and periodically through the book Turin recommends feminine florals for men. Is he kidding?
"I think men are afraid of being pretty," observes Sanchez.
"They're afraid of being interesting also," says Turin. "There are two sorts of guys: the gay guy, and he wears extravagant fragrances..." Sanchez: "They wear Joy!"
"... and they're fine with that. Then there's the straight guy who works in an office, and for that sort of fella, he doesn't want to smell different. He doesn't want to get into a lift with five people going, 'Who is this ponce?'. So all the masculine fragrances converge towards this grey-suit Hugo Boss shit."
Sanchez: "We got so depressed reviewing masculines. I gave up at some point, I couldn't tell the difference."
Turin: "And the thing is, any time a firm does an original masculine, it flops! There's no salvation. Insense, Bel-Ami... the history of masculine fragrance is, they try, complete cock up, six people got fired and they went back to boring. Really, it's amazing."
Isn't it different on the Continent? Those chic French men and dashing Italians are a bit more daring, surely?
"Nah. Listen, Bel-Ami was the litmus test," Turin snaps. "One of the greatest masculines ever: zero sales. Insense, the masculine floral: huge campaign to launch it. A FLOP."
That's not the only thing wrong with the perfume world. Much of the book is a lament for past greats, revolutionary perfumes that now only exist in traduced form, though they bear the same names: Vent Vert, Poivre, Tabac Blond, Cabochard ("chewed to a frazzle by accountant moths").
"No industry, no art, has less interest in its own history than fragrance, OK?" fumes Turin. "The only place in the world that you can smell the great masterpieces is a crappy little basement in Versailles, by invitation only. Maybe 10 per cent of perfumiers have smelt the original Chypre by Coty. It's like being a composer and never having heard a Beethoven quartet. Or saying , who is this Vermeer guy, when we have photography. What in God's name do these people think they're doing? Avery Gilbert, in his book What the Nose Knows, he makes fun of the Perfume Museum: who the hell wants to smell these old things? Well, perhaps not you, ya shitwit!"
Turin is more prone to seeing perfume as an art form; Sanchez was on hand to remind him periodically that people have to wear this stuff. This after all is a weird world, where to say that a Stella McCartney perfume smells of "unwashed hair" is not necessarily a slur. ("There's a material, quite an expensive one, that smells like dirty hair. It's wonderful stuff.")
A case in point is the curiously named Secretions Magnifiques, a five-star perfume from a "cheeky little outfit" called Etat Libre d'Orange.
"Stupendous secretions!" Turin beams, as Sanchez struggles to find the right words to describe it. "It smells like a J'Adore knock-off, a floral with this... note in it. He calls it 'bilge'; some people call it dirty tampon."
"That's not what dirty tampon smells like!" cackles Turin.
"I had to point out that no one in the world could stand wearing it for more than five minutes, although it's a daring piece of art," says Sanchez.
So what value, finally, has perfume criticism? To the charge that it's all subjective, Turin replies: "It's just like music, or literature or painting or poetry. You're going to find that most people rate Michelangelo's David. There can be a consensus and I think, if anything, in perfumery the consensus is higher than in other arts. Now, there's an awful lot of very expensive stuff that smells terrible."
"None of this would matter," sighs Sanchez, "if it was just all the same smelly crap. But the fact that some things are really beautiful and cause your heart to sing, means that you have to care. And once you care - everyone starts fighting."
'Perfumes: the Guide' is published by Profile
THE BEST...
- Mitsouko
- L'Heure Bleue
- Chanel No 5
- Joy
- Shalimar
- Angel
- Diorella
- Chanel Pour Monsieur
- Timbuktu
- Knize Ten
- Creed's Love in White
- Chanel Gardenia
- Michael Kors