Scent criticism. Writing about the invisible.

Roudnitska and the insider's aesthetics

Before critics wrote from outside, some perfumers tried to write about their craft as an art. Edmond Roudnitska was one of them. He made Eau Sauvage for Dior in 1966, and he also wrote, including L'Esthétique en question in 1977.

What Roudnitska argued was simple and rather bold: a perfume can be judged by aesthetic standards, like a painting or a piece of music. Not only pleasant or not, successful or not, but does it have form, does it have an idea, does it hold its balance.

Writing from inside the trade has a great advantage: the writer knows the materials. It also has a limit: the writer stands on the maker's side. Criticism in the full sense needs another voice, standing on the side of the person who smells.

Stars for a smell

In 2008 Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez published Perfumes: The Guide. The book did something few had done openly before: short reviews of a great many perfumes on sale, each given a star rating, as films are.

What made the book memorable was not only the stars. It was the voice. The two authors wrote about smell through images, comparisons, humour and candour. They praised fully what they found beautiful and did not hesitate to say what they found flat. Readers might disagree, but they always knew where the writers stood.

In the same years Chandler Burr wrote about perfume for The New York Times, putting smell on the same page as the other arts. In 2012 Burr curated The Art of Scent at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, an exhibition presenting twelve scent works, from Jicky in 1889 to 2012, as a major medium of artistic creation.

Fair to both sides

Scent criticism has its hard questions. Every nose differs. A scent shifts with skin, weather, the moment of smelling. A bottle may be reformulated after the review is printed. Today's stars may not hold for next year's bottle.

Perfumers sometimes feel that a brisk dismissal is unfair to months of work. Readers sometimes feel that long praise is hard to check. Both feelings have ground. Good criticism cannot erase them; it can only be open about how it smelled: where, for how long, against what.

Today, beside books, there are magazines devoted to smell, such as Nez in France, printing perfumers, historians and scientists side by side. Scent criticism is slowly finding a shared language, slower than other arts, but clearer than before.

Words doing the eye's work

A film critic can set a still beside the review. An art critic has a photograph of the painting. A writer on smell has nothing to set beside the text. Readers must trust the words, or go and smell for themselves.

So scent criticism is a hard exercise in language. It makes words do the eye's work: produce colour, texture, temperature, movement, from a sensation with no image. Done well, it does more than judge a bottle. It teaches the reader how to pay attention. A good description does not force agreement. It opens one more way to smell.

That may be its most lasting value. A star can be wrong. A good sentence stays, and next time we smell, we have one more word for what we feel.