To Turin’s initial point, familiarity with too many fragrances in general does breed cynicism. 9’s New Haarlem, with its coffee and amber. It’s sweeter and richer than either of those.

Nor is it the cool floral leather of Eau d’Italie’s Bois d’Ombrie. Leather is in there, but not the smoky leather of Le Labo’s Patchouli 24. The Perfume Posse blog has a good post on immortelle that lists a few other fragrances that use it.ġ740 is warm and buttery. Wikipedia says its scent is “best described as a mixture of burnt sugar and ham,” and another web reference compared it to maple syrup.

I had to look up immortelle: it’s a yellow flower also called everlasting. I felt this was when I smelled 1740: the shimmering classical accord of leather, immortelle, spice, rich pipe tobacco, and a sort of lived-in buttery warmth is simply irresistible. But every old roué hides at his core an unblemished memory of the boy he once was, ready to fall for the first creature whose intelligence revives his freeze-dried heart. The highest rated of Ghislain’s fragrances was 1740:ġ740 (Histoires de Parfums) five stars leather immortelleįamiliarity with too many trivial perfumes can at length turn one into a libertine of smell: cynical, unmoved, cruelly practical. Ambre 114 and Noir Patchouli also get four stars, but Blanc Violette and Vert Pivoine get only three. They give most of Ghislain’s collection high, four-star ratings: two masculines, 17 all four feminines, 1804, 1826, 1873, and 1876 and the unisex 1969. I’ll wager people who thought they didn’t care about perfumes and colognes would enjoy reading some of the reviews here.Īfter meeting Histoires de Parfums’ founder, Gerald Ghislain, at Henri Bendel on Thursday, I went home and looked up some of his collection in Turin and Sanchez’s book. In the meantime, we’re lucky this one is so good. There is (sadly) no other book like it for the world of fragrances. The writing is both erudite and entertaining. What makes it rise above a mere book of reviews is its wit.

This book is, for fragrance aficionados, the reference book. The latter is of course Perfumes: The A to Z Guide by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez. As I mentioned last weekend, I have two indispensable reference books that I keep re-reading, one on spirits and the other on fragrance.

Luca turin best perfumes