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Why aren’t there any critical reviews of perfume in the press, like there are for books, restaurants, wines or films? Let me put it this way. Once upon a time, a women’s magazine I worked for had set out to test (unscientifically) everything from the pulling power of famous actors to the warmth of fake furs. In a bid to beat consumer report magazines at their own game, our publisher kept prodding us to find ‘a face cream that gave women pimples’. We found a hapless journalist who’d caught a rash from a big-brand anti-wrinkle serum and published her story. The detergent-manufacturing behemoth that owned the brand immediately threatened to retrieve every single page of advertising for every one of its brands from every single magazine the press group owned around the world. Official apologies were issued. My chief editor got fired. The magazine haemorrhaged advertisers, and barely survived another two months. End of story.

There are no critical fragrance reviews in the press because the press depends on advertisers, and beauty features are essentially meant to keep advertisers happy. This isn’t to say there aren’t beauty editors who are knowledgeable about fragrance. And they do manage to slip in a few products from non-advertising brands that they actually love. That’s as far as they can go. Any straying from florid praise might discombobulate the luxury brands that keep the glossies alive. On the other hand, I can no longer keep track of the number of perfume blogs and websites. It seems every time I peer at the screen, another one has popped up.

There was only a handful, three or four maybe, when I stumbled into them in mid-2005 after Googling Luca Turin, a biophysicist who’d published a perfume guide in French in 1992. Luca’s reviews were irreverent, lyrical, side-splittingly funny: I’d never realized before reading them that it was possible to talk about perfume that way and, every year, I hoped he’d publish an updated edition. My search yielded Luca’s blog, and when I’d finished reading it, I started clicking on the signatures of the people who left the most interesting comments. That’s how I found Octavian Coifan, who went on to become a friend in the real world, then Bois de Jasmin, Now Smell This, Perfume-Smellin’ Things, the Perfume Posse … Within two years, my perfume collection had shot up to well over two hundred bottles. Perfume bloggers were the supreme enablers, tracking the obscure, the cultish, the vintage, cutting through the purple prose of press releases and magazine blurbs. They sniffed, they swooned, they dished the dirt. And as they went along, they invented a new language to talk about fragrance.

Most of the pioneers were members of Makeup Alley, a discussion board which features a reviews section. Now, reviewing cosmetics is a fairly straightforward business. Makeup and skincare make product claims: you’re meant to see the result. And if a moisturizer turns your face into an oil slick, you can tell. Perfume, on the other hand, does nothing but smell, which is why its advertising relies exclusively on the three aspirational ‘S’s: stars, sex and seduction, with a side helping of dreams or exoticism. To speak about it, Makeup Alley’s reviewers and their blogger offspring had to devise strategies that went beyond ‘Would I buy/recommend it?’ Descriptions, impressions, analogies, short stories, snippets of real-life testing, bits of history, parallels with music or literature … The styles could veer from ‘Gal in the Street’ to pure poetry. It was as though fragrance, because of its invisibility, mystery and evocative powers, had become a sort of writing generator that went far beyond its object. The very nature of the object seemed to attract a particularly literate community of amateurs, in the noblest sense of the term, ‘one who loves’.

But perfume is devilishly hard to discuss. If you don’t have your own mental catalogue of olfactory references, which is to say, smells linked with words, you won’t get much past ‘sweet’, ‘soft’, ‘screechy’ or ‘soapy’. One adjective comes from taste, the other from touch and the third from hearing; the fourth refers to a thing. There are very few words specifically related to olfaction in modern Western languages: descriptions draw from the vocabulary of other senses or from ‘real-word’ referents. Yet another problem is the names of notes that refer to nothing in common experience: amber, for instance. The word doesn’t designate the fossilized resin of the same colour, but two different things. Ambergris forms in the digestive system of whales when they swallow something that irritates their stomach lining, like cuttlefish bones. They eventually expel it; it rolls around in the sea for years, bleached by sun and salt, and eventually washes up on a beach in the form of greyish brownish lumps. The lumps themselves are pungent things that smell, according to Jean-Paul Guerlain, of ‘rye bread and horse manure’. Tinctured in alcohol, ambergris releases a delicate, warm, soft, slightly saline scent. For centuries, it was an essential material of perfumery and some houses still use it in their costliest blends, but few people have smelled it. Amber can also designate a blend of cistus labdanum (rock rose) resin and vanillin, invented by perfumers in the 19th century, a totally abstract smell that refers to nothing in nature. Yet ‘amber’ is a term commonly used to describe perfume notes and can refer to a slew of materials or accords. But go explain that to a novice who has smelled none of these.

Write about perfume and you’ll be caught between your own limitations, those of your readers and the fact that, usually, they won’t have the fragrance on hand to compare their impressions with yours. Even if you had the actual formula under your nose, you’d need training to decipher it; even if you had all the actual materials on hand as a reference, you’d still strain to figure out why the fragrance produces the effects it does. That said, perfumes aren’t made for chemists, and if you write ‘violet, iris, wood, leather’ instead of ‘methyl-ionone’, you’ll have a better chance of conveying the feel of a scent. Even with no knowledge whatsoever of raw materials, a writer with a keen olfactory memory, a good repertoire of fragrances and a way with words can write an evocative review. Connecting a scent with emotions, impressions, atmospheres … isn’t that why we wear it? Isn’t it all subjective?

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‘If you smell it, it’s there,’ smiled the impeccably elegant Jacques Polge, Chanel’s in-house perfumer. I’d just written a piece on the Exclusives, a high-end range sold only in the Chanel boutiques. What had intrigued Mr Polge was that it had been, unusually, published in a contemporary art magazine. When he called up the PR department to ask who I might be, they couldn’t answer. But a friend of mine who worked at a rare-books shop where Polge had been a client for years spoke to him about me. That’s how I ended up with an invitation for tea. Monsieur Polge would probably have been more inclined to discuss another one of our common interests, early-20th-century French poetry, but never having met a perfumer before – and the Chanel perfumer, no less – I endeavoured to draw as much information as I could, though not very successfully. ‘If you smell it, it’s there’ was, frustratingly, all he conceded when I asked him whether there was such or such a material in one of his perfumes. I could have read his answer as a dismissal (‘Little lady, just enjoy the stuff and leave the rest to the specialists’). Or it could’ve been I was right but that his policy was never to disclose that type of information. I chose instead to interpret it as an invitation to trust my nose.

But I don’t buy into the ‘it’s all subjective’ spiel. Sure, you can judge a painting based on whether you’d want it on your wall, a piece of clothing or a perfume based on whether you’d like to wear it. But just because you don’t want it in your life doesn’t make it bad. And it’s not entirely impossible to consider perfumes beyond their ‘like/don’t like’ Facebook status, which is to say, beyond their nature as consumer products.

When I first started covering fashion shows, I went at it like a girly-girl, picking the outfits I’d wear if I could afford them (consumer credit meant I could, and I’m still paying off that debt). But I co-wrote the reviews with a seasoned fashion journalist and she taught me how to ask other questions than ‘Would I wear it?’ The same questions you could ask of a perfume (or an exhibition, or a movie, for that matter): what intent does it set out to fulfil? How does it achieve its effects? How is it situated within the perfumer’s body of work? How does it fit in with the history of the brand or its identity? How does it compare to the current season’s offerings? Does it bring something new? What relationship does it bear to the history of the field? Can any light be shed on it through other creative fields?

These are objective questions and they can be answered objectively. We’re not always able to, sometimes because we don’t know enough, sometimes because the perfume doesn’t ask them. Clearly, this approach won’t answer queries like ‘Does this stuff need to go on my most-wanted list?’ But if at least a share of the art of perfumery is to be snatched away from the lacquered claws of the business-school Talibans it needs to be approached with something resembling art criticism: the more knowledge is collected, clarified and transmitted to the public, the more chances there are that at least part of that public won’t accept unoriginal products, thus encouraging the industry to trust the perfumers at least some of the time.

When the whole blogging phenomenon started taking on proportions significant enough for the industry to notice, quite a few professionals were either dismissive or dismayed, and generally reluctant to acknowledge it, much less engage with it. Indie perfumers, on the other hand, were active participants in the scene from the outset for obvious reasons: they have no budget for PR and their products are mostly sold online.

The most striking case is Andy Tauer’s. The self-taught Zurich perfumer started an online diary chronicling his creative process, dropped in to comment on other blogs, and sent their authors samples of his compositions. His talent, sweet disposition and openness endeared him to his public: unlike the stars working for big labs or Parisian niche houses, he was accessible through his blog and he was their discovery. Since then, Mr Tauer, a pure product of the online perfume culture, has been the poster boy of indie perfumery.

But the indie boom via online buzz is not the only way in which the thriving internet perfume culture has changed its object. In fact, something in the very nature of perfume may have shifted over the past few years.

Fragrance has always been a social medium. Though most people would say they wear it for themselves, it necessarily enters the social sphere since it is airborne, as the philosopher Immanuel Kant huffily remarked back in the 18th century: ‘Others are forced, willy-nilly, to participate in this pleasure. And this is why, being in contradiction with freedom, olfaction is less social than taste, where among many dishes or bottles a guest can choose one that he likes without others being forced to share the pleasure of it.’

Yet apart from the occasional ‘You smell lovely’ or ‘Yuck, is there something dead in here?’ the social interactions produced by fragrances remain mostly unspoken. Except, that is, within the loosely knit network of tens of thousands of people who style themselves ‘perfumistas’ after the neologism ‘fashionista’, from the Spanish suffix for ‘partisan of’, as in Communist. (I’m not wild about the word and I loathe ‘perfumisto’: the suffix ‘-ista’ applies to both genders.)

Fragrance generates community and this community is generating an ever-expanding volume of discourse. In fact, you could say the discourse on fragrance has been hijacked from its traditional owners, PR and marketing departments, beauty editors, trade journals … Each review or comment transforms the perception of a fragrance, its description and the story that surrounds it. Whether it is the lovingly nurtured brainchild of a perfumer or the Frankenscent pieced together by a harried team on a budget, perfume is no longer just liquid in a fancy bottle. No longer just a product packaged and advertised by a brand. No longer just the stuff you spray on before a date. Each atomizer has become a kind of wormhole to a parallel world bursting with words, feelings, stories and people who may know each other in real life, but most likely not. In a way, you could say that the critical and social discourse that now surrounds perfume enables perfume to exist more fully today than it ever has.

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What is, after all, a fragrance in a bottle? The brainchild of a perfumer, who’s composed a song, a poem, a story out of smells. Thousands of people may buy it: at least, that’s what he hopes. It may become a standard like Chanel N°5: he hopes for that too. But as long as it stays in that bottle, perfume is nothing, just as a song is nothing until it is sung and heard. It must be borne by skin, carried by air, perceived by noses and, most importantly, processed by the minds of those who breathe it in. The story told by the perfumer blends with the ones we tell ourselves about it; with our feelings, our moods, our references, our understanding of it. Once it is released from the bottle, it becomes a new entity, unique despite having been poured into thousands of bottles. We make it ours, like a singer sings a song: we are the performers of our perfumes.