“Perfume Is Such An Irrelevant Thing” – An Audience With Luca Turin At The Perfume Society [part 1]

People always talk about perfume and memory, as if perfume had a privileged access to memory. I don’t believe that to be true. Everything has a privileged access to memory. If you see a face or hear a tune or the timbre of a voice, it can trigger very powerful memories. The weird thing about perfumes, which is different from the other senses, is that there’s no relationship of similarity. With faces, if you see the sister or the brother of someone you once loved, you will get the shock of memory, because there’s a resemblance. In perfumes, there’s no resemblance. It’s either Ma Griffe, or it damn well is not. Therefore, that makes the shock of recognition much more rare. And that’s why it hits you.

You wrote your first book of reviews in French, right?

What do you think of perfume writing on the Internet today? Do you think things have gone too far in terms of the number of perfume blogs?

But what about knowing which opinions are right and which ones are wrong?

LT: There’s plenty of right and wrong when it comes to political opinions. But thank God, perfume is such an irrelevant thing, that you can practically do no harm with it.

LT: Lately, they’ve been doing a really good job. They’re an outlier point in perfumery, because they are weirdly obsessed with keeping things quite good, and they also do s**t perfumes. People always talk about diluting the brand and how you have to be careful. Chanel somehow manage to have a bulkhead between utter trivia – like Bleu, which is just garbage – and really great fragrances. And somehow, it doesn’t seem to damage them. But I know that the quality control in the really good fragrances is obsessional. For example, when it comes to Cristalle, they’ve recently sourced a new galbanum. And Cristalle is as good as it’s ever been.

LT: With Chanel, believe the hype. Guerlain is opaque. It’s a weird company. It’s very French. There is a tradition at Guerlain; I think there is a spirit of the place that carries on. Unfortunately, the top level of Guerlain, Sylvaine Delacourte etc… I’d better not start saying anything about them. It breaks my heart. [pauses] But I will say this. Guerlain has always been vulgar. This is something that people don’t quite appreciate. When I first moved to Paris as a student, my landlady, who was very classy, said to me, “There are two perfumers worth a damn in Paris. Guerlain and Caron. And Guerlain is for cocottes,” meaning kept women. So it should be remembered that Guerlain was never classy. It was always trashy. So in that respect, Sylvaine Delacourte is continuing the tradition. And you can print that.

In The Emperor Of Scent, Chandler Burr mentions that you and John Stephen made a perfume for Fragonard. Do you think there’ll ever be any more fragrances made by you?

LT: No, and thank God, because I was absolutely awful as an evaluator. I like perfume too much; I tend to like everything. But we had a fantastic time with John Stephen. He’s a great perfumer. And he’s also a pilot. So when Fragonard in Grasse commissioned this thing, we flew with a drum of the oil from Shoreham-On-Sea to Cannes Mandelieu airport together. We arrive in Cannes and the customs man comes up to their airplane and says, “What’s that?” So we said, “Perfume.” And he said, “What’s the matter? Is it faulty? Are you bringing it back??”

Are you concerned about the large number of launches these days?

LT: Well, most of those launches are fairly low-profile. The big launches are expensive affairs. But I’d say that about 90% of the 1400 launches are small potatoes. It’s sort of frustrating to think that there might be something really great in there. I remember when we were reviewing perfumes for the book, we got an enormous box from Dali Perfumes. They’ve done… I don’t know… 120 or something, and I was going, “Oh God!” But there were 2 or 3 really good ones in there. From the standpoint of somebody who’s interested in fragrance, 1400 launches is the stuff of nightmares. But at the same time, really, 95% will be crap. What’s peculiar is that the big ones are crap. When you have that kind of money and clout, you should be able to do something really good. I think the problem is art direction. There are very few good perfume art directors around. And the people who hire them in fashion houses are visual people, not smell people. So there’s a mismatch.

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In part 2, find out what Turin has to say about Frederic Malle, Amouage, Tauer… and what kind of scents men should wear. Click here to read it.

Turin’s latest book, Folio Columns 2003-2014, a collection of articles he wrote for NZZ Folio, is available now from Amazon; click on its title for more info. And to check out the perfume reviews he writes for Style Arabia, please click here.

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