Everyone’s a Critic
05 3rd, 2008 Author: Discount Perfume at Merwer.comN the realm of perfume, one man’s pudding is the next man’s tar. That the reaction to a fragrance can be visceral, and personal, is not news to Luca Turin, who over the years has inhaled and critiqued hundreds of scents. In assessing them, Mr. Turin, a scientist and fragrance expert, makes no attempt to hide his partisanship.
He describes Attrape-Coeurs, an amber violet perfume from Guerlain, as “an intense radiant Wurlitzer organ blast of rose violet and iris notes,” but paints a bleaker picture of Creed’s Love in White: “If this were a shampoo offered with your first shower after sleeping rough for two months in Nouakchott, you’d opt to keep the lice.”
Readers react to such colorful snippets from his new book, “Perfumes: The Guide” (Viking), written with his wife, Tania Sanchez, with varying degrees of admiration and respect. Mr. Turin is, after all, a dominant voice in a chorus of critics airing their views in books and magazines and, increasingly, on the Web.
In the last half-dozen years, their opinionated chatter has become catnip to consumers, some of whom stay up until the wee hours, reading about new scents on sites like makeupalley.com, which Mr. Turin characterized as “a 24-hour pajama party.”
That chatter, however, is also the bane of the fragrance industry, which, when it comes to romancing products, has traditionally claimed the last word.
“Perfume is the only art in which there’s never been a true word spoken,” Mr. Turin said in an interview, with a directness that has made him a thorn in the side of the industry. In his book, he recalled that as little as a year ago, Le Labo, a small New York perfumer, refused to send him samples, its makers sneering that “writing about perfume is like dancing about architecture.”
Today reviewers on Web sites and blogs like aromascope.com, scentzilla.com, boisdejasmin.com and perfumeposse.com have rendered that argument moot. Increasingly, critics like Robin Krug of Now Smell This, who said she has around 10,000 hits a day, and Chandler Burr, who reviews fragrance for T: The New York Times Style Magazine, cultivate a following by speaking directly to consumers, many of whom are aspiring connoisseurs themselves.
Often those shoppers collect, amassing as many as 200 bottles and vials in their homes. And many have learned to distinguish among olfactory families like fougère (fern) and gourmand (edible smells), and even to pronounce chypre (SHEE-pr, roughly), a classification based on citrus and woody notes.
As critics, they are fierce, responding to certain fragrances with rapture or, as often, with venomous contempt. A perfume like Poison, from Dior, is especially polarizing to bloggers, many of whom are stay-at-home moms or professionals in other fields. An enthusiast on Now Smell This described Poison as “a warm, luxurious velvet blanket draped across a satin settee. On the same site, the perfume was assailed as “a railroad spike through the brain.”
Black Orchid from Tom Ford was praised as “melting cupcakes on hot skin.” But a detractor called it “aged Romano in a carnivorous orchid hothouse.”
When they wish to be especially withering, bloggers designate a scent as a “scrubber,” the kind of smell you can’t wash off fast enough.
Their enthusiasm, though, can be infectious. Online scent aficionados have become a force to be reckoned with in the $2.9 billion high-end fragrance industry, which has had a slight decline in sales since 2007. Their interest in mostly unadvertised, limited-distribution brands has helped drive niche sales in 2007 to $253 million, a rise of 19 percent, said Karen Grant, the senior beauty analyst of the market research firm NPD. Niche brands have doubled in volume since 2005, accounting for 9 percent of sales, Ms. Grant said.
Not surprisingly, these critics’ uncensored comments have been anathema to the Estée Lauders and Cotys of the world, industry giants that have relied almost exclusively on advertising and glowing magazine commentary to spread their message and spur sales.
“No question, the industry people are unnerved,” said Rochelle R. Bloom, the president of the Fragrance Foundation, a trade group. “I often get calls from executives pleading, ‘Can’t you do something about all this chatter.’ ”
Yet traditional marketing does not address consumer desire to learn about the dizzying number of annual fragrance introductions — up from 300 ten years ago to more than 1,000 last year, according to NPD.
“In their marketing, mainstream perfumers have lost control, and that puts a lot of pressure on them,” said Allan Mottus, the editor of The Informationist, a cosmetics and fragrance trade magazine. He added that mass and high-end brands, as well as fragrance producers and suppliers like Givaudan and Symrise, are “just waking up to the news that they can’t own the customer.”
The explicit advertising for Tom Ford’s new men’s fragrance, which shows an amber-colored bottle wedged between a woman’s naked thighs, will likely have no impact on Richard Saja, an artist and embroiderer who stood inhaling fragrances at Bergdorf Goodman on Saturday morning. “I don’t care about perfume advertising or the bottle it comes in,” Mr. Saja said. “For me perfume is a visceral experience,” one that is deepened, he added, by scanning sites like sniffapalooza.com, an organizer, with several New York retailers, of a weekend of sniffing and sampling.
“Three years ago, this was a world I hadn’t explored,” he said. “But now the Web has demystified so much of the world of fragrances for me.”
Mr. Saja was among some 200 customers swarming the Bergdorf fragrance floor that day. Shoppers from London, Berlin and Piscataway, N.J., poked their noses into bottles, sniffed scent strips and inhaled deep draughts from decanters. Some parted with as much as $200 for a flacon of Sycomore, a new offering from Chanel.
Enthusiasts included Christine Jelley, the chief executive of a surge-protection gear maker. Swayed by blogs, she was intent on exploring new violet-scented offerings from Serge Lutens and Annick Goutal. “When someone becomes rhapsodic about a scent,” she said, “I want to see what they’re seeing in it.”
Kevin Saunders, an art therapist circling the Lutens and Jo Malone counter, is an occasional reader of basenotes.net and Now Smell This. Mr. Saunders carries with him on an iPod a list of scents he has read about, some to be sampled, others to buy. “At the least,” he said, “those blogs may prompt me into trying something.”
And there are signs that the industry is responding to Mr. Saunders and his online cohort. “Today you see more bloggers being invited to traditional press events, and a greater awareness among executives of emerging forms of media,” Jenny B. Fine, the editor of the trade journal WWD Beauty Biz, noted.
Marianne Diorio, a spokeswoman for Estée Lauder, acknowledged as much: “In the beginning we were nervous about the blogs. As with any new media, there were mixed emotions.” Pointedly, she added, “Now we could never think of launching a fragrance without contacting the bloggers.” The company engages in dialogues with critics, she said, and advertises some of its fragrances on sites like Now Smell This.
Firmenich, a producer and supplier of fragrances, operates osMoz.com, which made its debut in 2001 and claims 300,000 members. In recent months, the company has encouraged readers to share information and to rate fragrances, its own and others, Julien Levy, the site’s marketing director, said.
Commentators on coty.com prompted Coty, which makes fragrances by David Beckham and Jennifer Lopez, among others, to think of reissuing its greatest hits, scents like Emeraude and L’Origan, said Stephen C. Mormoris, a senior vice president of global marketing.
Such developments cannot come soon enough for Tania Sanchez. In “Perfumes: The Guide,” she chided that the perfume industry “hasn’t yet figured out the benefits or relaxing control.” She told of a prominent blogger threatened with a lawsuit by a perfume company because she had deemed its product only “O.K.,” and “a little disappointing.”
“When a sleek luxury goods company unleashes its lawyers on a suburban mom for not liking their new fragrance,” Ms. Sanchez wrote, “we know the world is changing.”
read comments (0)Meet Chandler Burr, Sniffer of Scents
04 25th, 2008 Author: Discount Perfume at Merwer.comJohn from Baltimore was good enough to translate my little article on Chandler Burr. He did such a marvellous job I wish to share it with you:
How is a wine expert different from a professional perfume critic? “Those are two fundamentally different things!” Chandler Burr takes on a tone of borderline outrage that these two things could be mentioned in a single breath. “Wine is nature, perfume is art. Wine is the name for what happens when grapes are pressed and the juice is left to its own devices. Perfume, on the other hand, is a creation from A to Z. The molecules in a single wine are almost laughably complex. The molecules that comprise a perfume are simple, clear, precise.” Does a perfume critic use the same slightly silly jargon as a wine tester? Does he also speak of chocolate, strawberries, notes of licorice, and tannin? No, Chandler Burr prefers to invent his own metaphors when sniffing. “This perfume here”, he says and closes his eyes, “is like a swimming pool in the summer. A hint of chlorine in the air. It’s hot, but you also sense that water is nearby.”
Chandler Burr is the official perfume critic of the New York Times. But if you were to call him the American pope of perfume, you would be guilty of a gross understatement. The Pope, as everyone knows, has cardinals, bishops, regular priests and the entire apparatus of the church-state under his authority. Chandler Burr, on the other hand, stands alone on a broad plain. There is that woman in France who reviews perfumes (what’s her name again?), and there are various bloggers, but that’s about it. Apropos “reviewing perfumes”: Chandler Burr’s profession is not obviously different from that of that of any ordinary literary critic. The leading perfume makers send him flasks of perfume that pile up like reviewers’ proofs on his desk on New York’s Seventh Avenue. And of course Chandler Burr is bound by the same strict ethical code as all other employees of the New York Times, i.e., he is not permitted to accept corporate gifts. Not even a teeny-tiny bottle of champagne. And the way in which Chandler Burr approaches his work is casual: He has rolled up the sleeves of the blue shirt he has put on for this session―“not my best one,” he says―exposing his hairy forearms. That’s where he sprays various scents without batting an eyelash. There are three things to examine with any perfume, he explains. First, how long will the stuff — what the experts call the juice―last on your skin? If it dissipates right away, then you might as well forget it. Second, is the scent easily recognizable even from a distance? If not, why should you spend your money on it? Third, do the molecules comprising the perfume harmonize with one another?
Now this is where things start to get interesting! For whose nose has the ability to determine that objectively? Janine, Chandler Burr’s utterly delightful assistant, trickles something from a green bottle onto a test strip for the perfume critic. (Janine is a young student whose secret wish is to become a journalist.) Burr flares his nostrils. “I like it,” he decides, and passes the strip on. A brutal cloud knocks out the brain stem for several seconds. Gradually, from the fumes, a picture emerges of a screamingly bright-colored plastic tub that is being used by an unfit mother to drown her insufferable brat in a bubble bath. Out of the distance a voice reaches my ear: “Pleasant kitschy aroma”, pecks Chandler Burr into his laptop, “sexy in a vulgar sort of way, not bad.” Later on we impose on our smell receptors a substance that smells, stinks, as if it were swiped from a pastry shop. In the mind’s eye of this German visitor there immediately appear unromantic images of Frankfurt’s Kaiserstrasse or Hamburg’s Reeperbahn. “Vanilla,” says Chandler Burr. “Men love vanilla, which is why whores the world over smell like it.
At the heart of the perfume industry there is an open secret from which the industry tries to distract attention through lots of PR clatter: 80% of the contents of an average perfume bottle are produced chemically in a laboratory; only about 20% of the ingredients are natural. Soon perfumes will be artificially manufactured right down to the last drop. Chandler Burr has no problem with this development, he even welcomes it. “The idea that only the natural is good is a religious notion, and I don’t like religions,” he says. The organs of smell would not be capable of distinguishing a lab-made molecule from its natural counterpart. And what’s more, he says, from an ecological standpoint it is much better to create scents in a lab than to go on an axe rampage in India’s sandalwood forests. And by the way: allergic reactions are as a rule triggered by natural substances. The human immune system is usually indifferent to synthetic substances. And one cannot even in good conscience assert cultural differences between the US (chemicals, ew!) and Europe (old, natural, dignified). As Chandler Burr demonstrates in his latest, brilliantly written book: both, Americans and Europeans, produce their perfumes predominately in the laboratory―quite simply, because it makes sense to (The Perfect Scent - A Year Inside the Perfume Industry in Paris and New York, Henry Holt, New York 2007. 306 pages, $25).
Later that same morning a woman drops in, visibly excited to be sitting face to face with the world’s greatest perfumologist. Her hands shake. She represents a pharmacist who, he has assured, has created a women’s scent from “purely natural substances” following an original medieval formula. We must swear holy oaths by torchlight to the strains of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” that we would not divulge any brand or firm names. So permit me to reveal here that the family business represented by the woman with jittery hands is headquartered in an Italian city beginning with the letter F and which is also home to the Uffizi. The excited woman takes various little bottles from a pretty case. Janine trickles, Chandler sniffs politely, types his findings into his laptop―this time without reciting aloud what he is writing. He takes pains to retain a poker face. “Horrible,” he says, after the woman has left. The banal truth, per Burr: The nice Florentine gentleman is not a perfume maker, but a dilettante.
But Chandler Burr is equally merciless with brand-name scents sent to him by the professionals. “This perfume,” he comments with enjoyment, “smells like the anus of an animal.” Isn’t that perhaps a bit extreme? “Smell it yourself,” says Chandler Burr abruptly. And, in fact, it is undeniable: This is pretty much the scent that would reach one’s nose if one were walking past the camel that is always lying around comfortably in front of Jerusalem’s Damascus Gate.
Chandler Burr has now been the New York Times perfume critic for two years. But he also has a proper academic background: economics, and he’s a japanologist too. He could also compile dossiers on the Japanese auto industry or write articles on mergers and acquisitions. In reading his book one notices also that he has had an old-fashioned education: Chandler Burr speaks Italian and French; his path is paved with Proust quotes. And so this German visitor feels compelled to ask him whether he has read Perfume by Patrick Süskind. Unfortunately I must report that Chandler Burr’s expression turns sour, even while he concedes that the first three pages―in which the protagonist creates a kind of scent-map of Paris―is eerily successful. But rather let’s return to talk about the scents that pretty women spray onto their skin―for Süskind got at least one thing right: smells affect the oldest region of the sensory/thought apparatus: the reptilian brain. “A good perfume is like a firework,” Chandler Burr explains, “or like a symphony. First there is the base color, and after it is burned other colors emerge, and then rockets are ignited that shoot out and bloom on the night sky like luminous flowers. . . .”
In the windowless back room, where we have smelled our way through dozens of perfumes, the air has gotten thick. Or, truth be told, it smells like a dentist’s office. Chandler Burr has had enough. I’m burned out,” he says, stretching his limbs, “I can’t go on.”
Are synthetic scents protected through some form of copyright? In practice, no. The perfumes of the leading makers are immediately taken apart and recreated in laboratories. Nevertheless one should not expect that in a thousand years there will be only a single super-scent―the headspinning scent on which all of the firms have reached agreement, so to speak. “Every age brings forth its own scents”, Chandler Burr lectures. He can of course distinguish a 60s scent from others. And the 70s, at least with respect to their chemical scents, were a good era―despite the horrible fashions of the time. How will the beginning of the 21st century be judged someday― from a purely perfume-related perspective? Chandler Burr bites into his breakfast muffin, which he has saved for this most precious of moments, and remains silent.