I fully agree, and I'll add a quick thought of my own: there are plenty of perfumes on the market today that don't hold well beyond their top notes some actually fall apart completely. Is it a simple case of cold feet?Īccording to the authors of Perfumes: The Guide, it's time for perfume companies to relax that rigid control, and to understand the benefits of honest and unbiased criticism.
Companies are reluctant to see their products being reviewed, and continue to rely on meaningless marketing blurbs for the promotion of their work. While online forums, blogs, and marketplaces have made perfume culture more accessible to the masses in recent years, the industry safely keeps its distance. But these are just minor obstacles compared to the "hoary, unbroken tradition of self-defeating behavior" of the perfume industry, as described by Sanchez in her Introduction to Perfume Criticism. There's also a preservation problem with perfumes, and constant issues with unannounced reformulations. There are a couple of practical drawbacks to perfume as an object of study: smell is a fleeting experience, it requires physical proximity, and you can't reproduce it by any other means (see Constance Classen and Diane Ackerman for more on that). I figure there's been enough talk about the reviews. I found them well worth reading, and worthy of a little reflection here too. In clear and simple words they explain why perfume is an art, why the industry should take consumers more seriously, and how a guide with unabashed opinions fits into all of this. I'd recommend those naysayers to pick up a copy of Perfumes: The Guide, and read the short preliminary essays where the authors share their views on perfume aesthetics and criticism. Some people, of course, can't fathom why perfumes are worthy of serious consideration in the first place, let alone why they should be reviewed in a book. In Perfumes: The Guide, authors Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez describe their favorite perfumes in similar terms: a great composition takes you by surprise, exceeds your expectations, blows you away.
If a book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a punch on the head, what are we reading it for?" That punch on the head, that wake-up call, was a defining element in 20th century art. In a letter to his friend Oskar Pollak, Franz Kafka (1883-1924) once wrote: "I believe we should only read books that bite and sting.
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