L'Air du Désert Marocain (Tauer) ***** incense oriental
The sweet, resinous smell of amber, the smell of the classic perfume oriental, has long been weighed down with vanilla and sandalwood ballast, decorated with mulling spices, bolstered with musk, made come-hither, ready for its closeup, and we are quite used to it—but this is not amber's first life. Perfume, as has been pointed out many times, means “through smoke,” named for the fragrant materials burned to clean the air and therefore the spirit. Since the angel Metatron sees fit to deliver his messages to the world nowadays via the guitar of Carlos Santana, it only makes sense that the as yet unnamed angel of perfume chooses to speak through an unassuming Swiss chemist from Zurich with a mustache and a buttoned shirt. L'Air du Désert is talented amateur perfumer Andy Tauer's second fragrance, after the rich oriental rose of Maroc pour Elle; one hale breath of Désert's vast spaces clears the head of all the world's nonsense. There is something about the ancient smell of these resins (styrax, frankincense) that on first inhalation strikes even this suburban American Protestant with no memories of mass as entirely holy, beautiful, purifying, lit without shadow from all sides. Even without the fragrance's name to prompt me, I would still feel the same peace when smelling it that I've felt only once before, when driving across the Southwestern desert one morning: all quiet, no human habitation for miles, the upturned bowl of the heavens infinitely high above, and the sage and occasional quail clutching close and gray to the dun earth. Each solitary object stood supersaturated with itself, full to the brim, sure to spill over if subjected to the slightest nudge. Wear this fragrance and feel the cloudless sky rush far away above you. TS

Eternity for Men (Calvin Klein) * * * mandarin lavender
An interesting twist on the perennially pleasant citrus-lavender accord using the (musically speaking) flattened note of mandarin rather than straight citrus, or the corresponding sharp of lime. This is a very skillfully composed and likable fragrance, but I wish more cash had been spent on the formula. It smells good but cheap, which would be fine if the overall structure were unpretentious as in Cool Water, whereas it is distinctly aspirational. LT

Spellbound (Estée Lauder) * medicated treacle
Powerfully cloying and nauseating. Trails for miles. Frightens horses. Gets worse. TS

Tommy Girl (Tommy Hilfiger) * * * * * tea floral
No fragrance in recent memory has suffered more from being affordable than Tommy Girl. It’s as if it were deemed less desirable for being promiscuous. Despite all the historical evidence to the contrary (Brut, Canoe, Habanita, and the first J-Lo), the world is still crawling with naïve snobs who’d rather believe their wallet’s loss than their nose’s gain. Tommy Girl’s origins were explained to me by creator Calice Becker, who was brought up in a Russian household, with a samovar always on the boil and a mother with a passion for strange teas. At Becker’s instigation, the legendary chemist Roman Kaiser of Givaudan sampled the air in the Mariage Frères tea store in Paris to figure out what gave it its unique fragrance. From this a tea base was evolved, in which no one showed much interest. The idea waited several years until Elléna’s excellent but only remotely tea-like Eau Parfumée au Thé Vert (Bulgari) came out in 1993. Its success made it possible for Becker to submit a tea composition for the Hilfiger brief. She won it, eleven hundred formulations later the perfume was finalized, in collaboration with a brilliant evaluator who went on to study philosophy. Tea makes excellent sense as a perfumery base, since it can be declined in dozens of ways, as flavored teas will attest: Soochong, Earl Grey, jasmine, and so on. In that respect it could serve as a modern chypre, a mannequin to be dressed at will. Tommy Girl clothed it in a torero’s trafe de luces, a fresh floral accord so exhilaratingly bright that it could be used to set the white point for all future fragrances. Remarkably, late in the project, Hilfiger’s PR firm asked Becker to give them so e reason to label the fragrance as typically American. Quest’s resident botany expert was called in, and to everyone’s surprise found that the composition fell neatly into several blocks, each apparently typical of a native American botanical. So it goes with projects whose sails are filled by the breath of angels. LT

The composition miraculously turned out to fall into accords typical of native American botanicals? Put me on record as skeptical. Tommy Girl smells great, though, and has been copied relentlessly. TS

Beauty Rush Appletini (Victoria's Secret) * Jolly Rancher
Victoria's Secret has determined that its customers need (1) cleavage and (2) to smell precisely like dime-store candy. You may discern an implicit insult to the male mind in this pair of facts. TS

“While the authors embrace point systems and science, they also offer vivid, funny, evocative descriptions of the smells they write about…To enjoy Perfumes, you don’t need to know, or even to like, perfumes, such is the brio of Turin’s and Sanchez’s prose…This is fun to read – and a rare pleasure, too…The joy of Turin and Sanchez’s book, however, is their ability to write about smell in a way that manages to combine the science of the subject with the vocabulary of scent in witty, vivid descriptions of what these smells are like. Their work is, quite simply, ravishingly entertaining, and it passes the high test that their praise is even more compelling than their criticism…Its blend of technical knowledge and evocative writing is exemplary in the strict sense: people who write about smell and taste in any context should use it as an example.”
-The New Yorker

“This comprehensive book is unfailingly entertaining…Their passion for a few scents and their outrage at the others’ failings make for entry after entry of hilarious, catty comments interspersed with occasional erudite, eloquent disquisitions…This will be a must-have for anyone who already loves perfumes…and those who aren’t utterly perfume-obsessed will still appreciate the opening essays on olfactory science, the history of perfume, general types of fragrances and how to choose perfumes.”
-Publishers Weekly, starred review

“After spending the better part of a weekend reading a galley – often aloud to anyone willing to listen – I'm convinced Turin and Sanchez offer some of the most stylish, erudite and hilarious criticism in any subject field.”
-Dallas Morning News

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