Perfumes: The Guide | 
 enlarge | Authors: Luca Turin, Tania Sanchez
Publisher: Viking Adult
Category: Book
List Price: $27.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  59 reviews
Sales Rank: 7690
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 54 more reviews...
 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.
What writing! June 1, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I bought this book after reading a review commenting about the evocative writing. I agree with it all. This book is positively orchestral in the way it describes perfumes. If you are searching for away to understand perfume options without having to be sprayed by all of the possibilities, take a look at this book. I went out and bought small samples of 12 new perfumes after reading this book, and each one was a new experience heightened by what I had learned. My only concern, and the reason I didn't give the book 5 stars, was that it occasionally assumed a level of perfume knowledge at times that I don't have, and I could have used a more basic introduction to terms and concepts.
 Entertaining, ultimately not useful May 31, 2008
4 out of 10 found this review helpful
After hearing several interviews with the authors in support of "Perfumes a Guide", I gave it a look-see. Several reactions:
1. Maybe there's just something I'm not comprehending, but I don't get how these reviews can be anything but completely subjective. Yeah, I know, I read the authors' credentials, PhD in biophysics, "avid collector and expert" (whatever that entails), but I still don't get how this can boil down to anything other than "I like- I don't like."
2. The terminology (even with a glossary in the back) is really almost incomprehensible.
3. The prose is beautiful and often quite funny in a snobby/ snotty way, but in the end, it was completely unhelpful in making me understand what a fragrance smells like or what I might like to wear.
4. The authors seem to be totally biased toward classic (and often French) fragrances such as Chanel and Guerlain, all of which smell very old fashioned and well, perfumey to me. Not something I would ever wear. My favorite fragrance in the world, on the other hand (which shall remain nameless), they condemn as "terrible" and "hideous". I suspect it's because it doesn't smell like their idea of a classic perfume. To me this is akin to only liking Beethoven and being unwilling to listen to Bernstein (let alone the Beatles).
So my recommendation is, get it from the library and skim through it for the fun of the writing. Don't take it at all seriously, and DON'T let it influence your very personal choices about how you smell!
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