Who is questioning the Guide?

No fragrance company has taken an official stance on "Perfumes The Guide" yet. Nevertheless, at least a handful have personally contacted me with questions on what was mentioned about their products following my review of the new guide by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez. Therefore I am deducing that it's still early and developments will follow. Hopefully those will be for the greater good of the dedicated perfume lover and not to the detriment of free expression and critique.

However upon perusing perfume boards and especially those who are not as simpatico to Luca as Perfume of Life is, such as the huge fragrance board of Makeupalley and the populous forum of Basenotes, I came across this scathing questioning which provided pause for thought.

Upon discussing the authors' opinions on current Caron perfumes, someone asked just what exactly happened to Caron to which this is the reply.

"They don't go into many details {about reformulations}. They just say that everything has been given a "soapy rose drydown" and is now thin and wan.
Both assertions are untrue.
And last week I tested four new Carons on my skin and let them dry down for hours. Not a trace of "soapy rose"!
Yep, and they claim that it's happened very recently (within the last year). Well, last week I went to the boutique in New York myself and compared the current perfumes with some older (1-3 years old) samples and decants that I have.
There was no difference. They haven't been "ruined" at all. It's a lie".

~posted by MizLiz211 (an avid Caron collector) on 4/15/2008 12:02PM on MUA

The criticism of Richard Fraysse's work on the Carons is worth pondering on, especially in light of Turin's raves on the recent reformulation of Mitsouko by Edouard Flechier for Guerlain; a reformulation which had most of the perfume lovers up at arms about it ruining the iconic chypre by seriously reducing the oakmoss base due to restrictions on the material's use by IFRA and the EU.

Hot on the heels of the above quote, comes this one, which I think applies to much more on the Net than the issue at hand (but let's not digress):

"An opportunity to rant: Have you noticed how often in LT's writing it turns out that something you will never be able to sniff (Nombre Noir, original Whatever) is the VERY BEST, transcendent, fabulous, and what you can buy now is SWILL?
Perhaps this is in fact true. Perhaps everything gets ruined.

But also perhaps:

1. Memory is faulty, even LT's memory.
2. Some things do get improved.

And isn't it convenient that I, the reader, cannot sniff LT's comparison for myself and therefore judge whether he has rocks in his head or not?
I think LT is a very very gifted writer -- I wish I could write as well. I'm thrilled that perfumes are being given the attention they deserve - if people are going to make money assessing wines, why not perfumes?

But the only sort of guide I'm interested in right now is something that would tell me what to buy now that Violette Precieuse has been changed. (Worsened? Depends on what you like. It happens to not have been changed in a direction I want to wear. But is it worse? Dunno.)"

~posted by Sarasotagirl (herself a book critic and journalist) on 4/15/2008 11:44AM on MUA

These are some serious doubts and they are stated by respected members of the fragrance board on Makeupalley, a place which Tania Sanchez credits as an infinite source of fragrance education.
It would be really enlightening and useful if the authors chimed in to clarify and reply to them and I am giving them the opportunity here, if they wish to pursuit it.

To be fair and striving for impartiality, as is customary to Perfume Shrine, I have to point out that in this truly Titan task they undertook, they reviewed almost 1500fragrances. Doing the math and supposing it would suffice if they didn't try them all out on both their skins, that's 700 each in less than 1.5 year! Some relative haste had to be in action if only to be professionally on time for the deadlines of the editor.
Furthermore, someone could question the memory of any individual ~and certainly in some cases it transpires through the writing that not all different concentrations of certain perfumes had been put to the test, such as was the case with Chanel No.5 till very recently per Luca's admission, or still remains so with certain others). But, and this is a big but, I wouldn't doubt the gas chromatograph and mass spectrometer on Luca's side. An objective and definitive test to be sure! Then again, it wouldn't be easy to run all classics in different batches through it to ascertain differences with the current versions.
The matter is terribly complicated.

Perhaps after all is said nothing sinister is at play and simply expectations are set very high because Luca Turin has earned the position of authority in fragrant matters and members on perfume boards act in proviso to that.

Now that Turin is leaving Flexitral after patenting several molecules to pursue a different path we wish him to go ahead and sell the innovations to the fragrance industry, if that means that a sufficient quality level would be attained to please us all. Because that is the crux of the matter which unites us all.

One silly question remains: what will they do with all those bottles they have accumulated (almost 2000 bottles per Tania's words)? Do they have a contingency plan?

Pic courtesy of Athinorama