After downloading the newsletter update to Perfumes: The Guide and reading through the new reviews, I found it a little strange that several perfumes were derided as “too loud” when Luca Turin is nothing if not a fan of big, loud, bullhorns disguised as fragrances. For example: Bond No. 9 Chinatown — five stars; Thierry Mugler Angel — five stars; Gucci Envy — five stars; YSL Kouros — five stars; Dior Poison — five stars; Guerlain Mistouko — five stars; the list goes on and on.
I’m reaching the point where I regard the perfume reviews of Luca Turin the way one might regard the rantings of a crazy uncle — entertaining, but ultimately useless in any real-world sense. While the reviews collected for the actual book displayed a certain consistency in outlook, the new reviews available for visitors to the website appear rushed and weirdly contradictory.
Boucheron Boucheron is described as a “massive floral” and receives five stars for its “oversized heavy beauty”; Serge Lutens El Attarine is rated four stars and the accompanying text is chock full of words like “louder”, “heavier”, “supercharged” and “enormous”; the huge Giorgio from Giorgio Beverly Hills is feted with four stars while also complimented as containing a “monstrously powerful tuberose”; and Guerlain’s Insolence is rewarded with five stars and crowned as a “Godzilla floral” — so it’s with more than a little confusion that I read his two-star review for the very wearable Nasomatto Narcotic Venus: “Tuberose foghorn — blaring, unsubtle, a kind of scrambled Insolence without the skill and the fun. If you meet someone who wears this, run.”
Uhm, okay, sure. I’ll stand my ground for the girl in a flame-breathing Godzilla Floral, but run at the approach of a mere Foghorn Tuberose? Correct me if I’m wrong, but criticizing Narcotic Venus for not being subtle enough while praising other fragrances for their massive, heavy, outsized, monstrous and Godzilla-like qualities makes for a classic example of cognitive dissonance.
I’ve laughed before with a friend of mine about Turin’s salivating penchant for perfumes that are the olfactory equivalents of large-breasted Rubenesque females cinched into whalebone corsets, and it’s precisely this enslavement to old-fashioned notions of beauty that threatens to undercut the detached scientist-critic image Turin worked to project in Perfumes: The Guide and Chandler Burr’s The Emperor of Scent.
Narcotic Venus is a flat-out high-heels and take no prisoners floral (with a radiant, woody-floral drydown), yet its femininity is informed more by contemporary ideals of strength as beauty rather than the Rubens, corsets and beauty-as-strength femininity of the 1700′s, and this is where I diverge wildly from Luca Turin in my opinion of what makes for a successful feminine fragrance.
Intellectual curiosity, emotional independence and casual confidence? I’m right there with you (thanks Le Labo and Comme des Garcons!). But the sweet, sticky and furtively traditional notions of womanhood that peer from behind the curtains of the Shalimars, Mitsoukos and Tocades? I’ll take a pass.
For what it’s worth, Turin gave Serge Lutens Tuberose Criminelle, a true foghorn of a mentholated tuberose if there ever was one (and a fragrance that I find near screechingly unbearable), a four-star review in his book, so his prim, “it’s blaring and unsubtle!” take on the far more languid Narcotic Venus just doesn’t ring true for me. He must have run out of coffee that day, or he got in a fight with Tania, or something.
BTW, another example of the Turin cognitive dissonance: in Perfumes: The Guide, Turin objected with vehemence to the trend of Sport fragrances — “This stuff is for the generic guy wishing to meet a generic girl to have generic offspring. It has nothing to do with any other pleasure than that of merging with the crowd. My fondest hope is everyone will stop buying them and the genre will perish. Just say no.” But his latest review for Dior Homme Sport? Four stars (out of five) — “riveting compared to the competition. As such, it deserves to be very successful.”
So you’ll understand when I say that I’m removing my copy of Perfumes: The Guide from the reference pile and filing it under “comedy” . . .
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Your friend sounds cool …ish. Won’t it be a hoot of Monsieur Turin ever ventures onto this blog? He’s certainly no stranger to criticism of his reviews, but it’s always entertaining when he responds. Tart, to be sure, but entertaining. For all his seeming love of Mae West fragrances, he seems neurotic which endears him to me a bit.
“Your friend sounds cool …ish.” LOL!
I doubt he would venture onto this blog, but if he does, he seems quite immune to critical barbs (which is a good thing — nothing worse than a thin-skinned critic).
I like his writing style, but am bemused at what appears to be an increasingly scattershot style of critique: “I hate sport fragrances and wish they would disappear off the face of the planet! Dior Homme Sport gets 4 stars! I love big, huge, massive, in your face florals! Narcotic Venus is blaring and unsubtle!”
For god’s sake man, choose a side. I mean . . . really.
I’m starting to find threads of consistency – a certain affinity for a particular kind of transparency – Cabaret, Yohji Homme. A glee in things that were new ideas and transformational for the industry – Angel. A love for the classic backbone scents – Mitsouko, Chanel 5.
The occasions he jumps the other way don’t bother me so much because he’s funny, because he loves his subject so much, because he nails it so beautifully sometimes (When I read the Obsession review I laughed so hard I fell off the couch. It is, I regret to say, the scent I wore though high school and into college) and well – is consistency the most important thing?
I dunno – I like some big loud things and not others, find some quietly compelling and some quiet to the point of invisibility. I contain multitudes. Don’t we all?
I will certainly be trying Narcotic Venus though.
Juno: yes, I agree with what you’re saying, and thanks for taking the time to say it.
I do very much appreciate Turin’s relish for the fragrance industry, and I regret that my post did not compliment him for his appreciation of many of the modern perfumes that have recently hit the market (reading his work introduced me to Le Labo Patchouli 24 and S-Perfumes S-eX, which I love).
I think my criticism is aimed at what I perceive to be an increasingly rushed and scattered style of review. Writing that he doesn’t like a fragrance because it’s too loud, blaring, or unsubtle makes little to no sense given his already well established proclivities for loud, blaring and unsubtle fragrances.
If I were his editor, I would have handed the review back to him and requested that he spend an extra five minutes in the attempt to explain how this particular volume and blare differs from other volumes and blares he’s previously heaped with praise.
All that said, I have burst out laughing at some of his reviews, because he truly can hit it out of the ballpark. His review for Narcotic Venus, however, struck me as more of a bunt.
Totally fair. The more specific the better, particularly for someone who’s made his bones on finding the exact words to evoke. And I don’t disagree that the update was a bit scattershot, though I attributed that to it being an awkward size, to big for a just a few passionate favorites, and yet not large enough to really be comprehensive.
Sometimes I like the 4 stars better – I found myself ordering a bottle of Cabaret as soon as I could find it, and yet the 5 star description above it – Boucheron? Left me total unmoved.
I think (*g*) it said something about a massive floral?
I agree his opinions seem to be inconsistent, but then, I read his reviews for entertainment value only. A good friend of mine wears Narcotic Venus beautifully, and it is not the least bit loud on her.
Juno — I think you’re on to something! I’m finding myself far more interested in his three and four star ratings than the five star stuff. Whatever ephemeral quality about a fragrance that moves him to give it five stars is usually not my five-star cup of tea (there are always exceptions) — it’s the ones where he finds a bit of fault that I personally appreciate.
Maybe it’s that “massive floral” thing that you mentioned. Turin seems absolutely smitten with anything that resembles the entirety of Buckingham Gardens stuffed into a jar.
Tara — Our good friend Sharil also wears Narcotic Venus to great effect, and god knows she’s not a fan of blaring foghorns, so, again, I’m puzzled at his response to NV — I don’t have any personal investment in the success of the Nasomatto line (I loathed Duro), I just found his review odd in the context of his body of work.
Like I mentioned in my blog post, maybe he was having a particularly bad day when he wrote that review. It’s too bad we don’t have some kind of critic mood-meter: “Thursday, woke up with a headache, mad at the world, I hate this perfume!”