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A Year Inside the Perfume Industry in Paris and New York
by Chandler Burr
No journalist has ever been allowed into the ultrasecretive, highly pressured process of originating a perfume. But Chandler Burr, the New York Times perfume critic, spent a year behind the scenes observing the creation of two major fragrances. Now, writing with wit and elegance, he juxtaposes the stories of the perfumes - one created by a Frenchman in Paris for an exclusive luxury-goods house, the other made in New York by actress Sarah Jessica Parker and Coty, Inc., a giant international corporation. We follow Coty's mating of star power to the marketing of perfume, watching Sex and the City's Parker heading a hugely expensive campaign to launch a scent into the overcrowded celebrity market. Will she match the success of Jennifer Lopez? Does she have the international fan base to drive worldwide sales? In Paris at the elegant Hermes, we see Jean Claude Ellena, his company's new head perfumer, given a challenge: he must create a scent to resuscitate Hermes's perfume business and challenge le monstre of the industry, bestselling Chanel No. 5. Will his pilgrimage to a garden on the Nile supply the inspiration he needs? The answer lies in Burr's informative and mesmerizing portrait of some of the extraordinary personalities who envision, design, create, and launch the perfumes that drive their billion-dollar industry.
"It would be selfish of me to give The Perfect Scent any more than three stars, because it’s not great. But the secret is, I loved reading it. And a few among you just might love reading it, too. The world Chandler Burr lays bare is utterly fascinating, but past the first chapter, probably only to those who are already fascinated. If you regularly walk into a room and sniff with deep concentration, unable to rest until you determine the exact combination of fabric-softener and slightly sour foodstuffs you’re detecting, this book is for you! Burr blends all the deeply satisfying details of scent creation – from inspiration, to concept, to resources, to chemical construction – with compelling portraits of the eccentric and exacting characters behind them in a dishy mishmosh of fashion, chemistry, travel, celebrity, and luxury culture.
Unfortunately, Burr is a little self-important and figures too prominently in a story that would be best served by an invisible – or more modest -- narrator. While the pleasure he takes in telling the story is contagious, he crosses over into excessive and overwrought more often than not, and the narrative thread is dropped and picked up and stitched over rather inelegantly, all of which makes this a book best skimmed for the good parts and forgiven for the rest."
- BookBrowse; Lucia Silva.
"Burr sharply evokes the intoxicating, often infuriating mix of precise science and artistic vision necessary to create a perfume, aided by his impressively calibrated BS detector and ability to unearth the industry's many dirty little secrets. An unusually grounded depiction of a business built largely on artifice." - Kirkus Reviews.
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