Perfumes: The A-Z Guide - Tapa dura

Luca Turin is a controversial 'smell scientist' and the proud owner of a world-class nose. Motored by this sensitive organ, he has spent the past twenty years explaining science to the perfumers and perfume to the scientists ... here he sets out to do nothing less than reclaim perfume as a great art to rival music, fine art or literature. Together with his wife Tania Sanchez (who seems to possess an olfactory organ almost equal to his own) he catalogues all of today's major fragrances. But this is less a self-help beauty guide than an artistic survey. Perhaps one day it will find a place in the Oxford Companion series ... the descriptions are irreverent, poetic ... the authors are not afraid to be blunt - Turin describes a Jo Malone fragrance as 'fit for an upmarket hair conditioner' - and they are not afraid to take themselves and the perfumes seriously...

Most readers will have to take Turin's descriptions on trust and to hope that he will train us to smell better. It is this enforced trust that makes Turin a potential charlatan but that also makes the book enticing. If we cannot smell the fragrance of the dawn or of a McCartney song we need to imagine them, and it takes a poet to enable us to do so. There is a great tradition of olfactory literature, and in Perfumes Turin confirms his right to be classed alongside Proust or Patrick Süskind as a poet of smell. He promises that a colourful and sonorous world will open up, if we will only follow where he leads.

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Turin's entries in his alphabetical guide to fine fragrances are brilliant exercises in synaesthesia; to him, perfume is a hallucinogenic substance that links everything. Each paragraph awarded to a masterpiece mix covers chemistry, biology, composition (with professional footnote on composer), commercial and political history (the European Union polices ingredients if they put the wearer, maker or environment at risk), personal memories, fantasies, and cross-references to arts, high and low. Consider his analysis of Eau Sauvage, by Edmond Roudnitska for Dior in 1966. He references Garamond type, Prokofiev, Jascha Heifetz and his Guarneri violin, pine needles and rosemary, Vietnamese beef salad, Transformer toys and hedione, aka methyl dihydrojasmonate, discovered in 1962 and capable of moistening florals until they feel fresh as dawn. Such a review could be a dog's dinner, or, worse, all that a dog can sniff the length of a back alley, but it's so exact that it's a kick, a written spritz of cologne. I sprayed on Eau Sauvage again, and for the first time could put a name - that salad - to its lime and coriander.

Now and again I've consulted online perfume blogs, by addicts for addicts, only to give up because of the ineffability that is their common language. Aromas waft; adjectives shouldn't. The dialect of oenophiles (gooseberries, bananas) is grounded in comparison. If there is to be any hope of persuading people to make perfume as much a quotidian reward as wine and food have become these past thirty years, there has to be a way to write about it that excites us, makes us curious, makes us laugh. Turin has found it. I've just blown all my pocket money on sampling an unknown five-star wonder, Guerlain's Habit Rouge, and it's Turin's fault for describing it as "soft and rasping, like stubble on a handsome cheek". (Eau de early Harrison Ford, as it were.) His approach reminds me of the Action Cook Book and Ou est le Garlic?, written and illustrated by Len Deighton in the 1960s and my teen introduction to cuisine. Deighton assumed his readers barely knew where our mouths were and remedied that through gastronomical science essays, comic-strip recipes, and commentaries that shared Turin's multicultural references - fast cars, old planes and actresses who had slept with François Truffaut. A lifetime later I still quote Deighton on the physics of overfrying eggs, and I shall be reciting Turin into old age on Le Feu d'Issey: perfume as a "portable form of intelligence ... fresh baguette, lime peel, clean wet linen, shower soap, hot stone, salty skin ... fly past one's nose at warp speed".

There is a second voice in this book, that of Tania Sanchez. Both authors point out that fragrances aren't aphrodisiacs or sex pheromones, and sulk at the narrow definitions of sexual identity standard in the fragrance trade, but their contributions are terrifically gendered, and that's a compliment. She provides the advice for novices and the true confession that starts with the "belief that Old Spice/Brut/English Leather is the natural odour that God caused fathers to emit after shaving" and ends with enlightenment, Chanel's Bois des Iles, equivalent to a little black cashmere dress, which she wore whenever she "needed extra insulation from the cold world".

For a while I thought she was playing Eva Marie Saint to Turin's Cary Grant, but her voice is faster and wackier than that, more the young Barbara Stanwyck, and there's screwball comedy in their interaction. They disagree about classics; he quotes her approvingly (that salad interpretation is hers), she quotes him disbelievingly; they spar through hundreds of one-word or two-line dismissals of inept pongs - "burial wreath", "grim floral", "canned fruit".
Nobody is meant to begin this volume at the dedication, as I did, and keep on going to the glossary, but should you do so, you'll have witnessed a witty courtship conducted through competitive discernment: when I learned they were married, I wasn't a bit surprised. Not after Sanchez's wicked whistle at a slug of Stetson, which is promoted as quintessence of manly Montana but is "as rugged and masculine as the lingerie level at Saks Fifth Avenue ... I'd truly love a man who wore this, but in the absence of one, I'll gladly wear it myself."

Romance with brains needs adversity to flourish, and to create this guide Turin and Sanchez gallantly went through odorous hell. About 40 per cent of concoctions were classified awful or disappointing and another 40 per cent only adequate. High prices, movie star ads, prestigious houses, gifted creators, sculptural flacons, historic longevity, massive sales: none guarantees that the liquid won't smell of mall rat effluvia, sports sneaker juice ("bloodless, gray, whippet-like, shivering little things"), Paris Hilton's Just Me ("barf-bag floral") or absolutely nothing with a faint hint of melon in the case of L'Eau d'Issey. Sanchez claims everybody knows at least five people who wear this: we may not move in the same circles. Contrariwise, cheapness is no deterrent to sublimity, since 150 years of research have rearranged enough molecules to supply superb macro cyclic musks to manufacturers of laundry detergent. All the way through this book I was saddened, as I am when I see a beautifully designed plastic milk bottle, that we don't respect the scents, dyes and objects created from carbons bequeathed by long-set suns, just because they've been dirt cheap for forty years.

Turin and Sanchez are not conventional snobs. Besides the Guerlain family, who have been getting it mostly right since Jicky, the most laudatory entries are for Estée Lauder, "faithful keeper of one of the most consistently high-quality lines of fragrances ever created". I'd never thought of sniffing her commissioned brews until I wrote her obituary and wanted to understand why Youth Dew, which she spilt on the carpet at the Galeries Lafayette as an olfactory calling card, had made her fortune. I bought samples of Lauder greats, which turned out to be Paris as imagined by the art department at MGM, a distillation of yearning more potent than the real thing.

The least expensive preparation in this book rates its most tender, five-star review: Caldey Island Lavender, by Hugo Collumbien, now in his nineties, for the South Wales monastery. Turin says its gently handled linalool, lavender's 10-carbon alcohol, results in "endlessly blue daylight air": it reminds me of Vermeer's use of the precious pigment ultramarine, made from lapis lazuli and traditionally reserved for the Virgin Mary's robe, on the apron of a servant pouring milk. A blessing for the daily round and common task, anyway: £7.75 a bottle.

It also features introductions to women's and men's fragrances, to trends and to history and chemistry; a glossary and many 'Top Ten' lists; and an informative section on frequently asked questions. A truly unique and useful guide, one written with a passion for its subject, and a perfect gift.

SAMPLE EXTRACTS
Chinatown (Bond. No. 9) ***** gourmand chypre
The endearingly plucky firm of Bond No. 9 has produced its first masterpiece ... like a corner of a small French grocery in summer. A treasure in a beautiful bottle.

Hugo (Hugo Boss) ** unexciting lavender
Dull but competent ... suggestive of a day filled with strategy meetings.

Gardenia (Chanel) * not gardenia
...a thoroughly unpleasant, loud airport-toilet floral.