Writer and wine critic Jay McInerney says that a wine critic should write as if he loved a wine with passion or hated it like poison. In his view, the critic should dispense with cold chemical analyses and instead show his love for wine. For the year-plus that I’ve been reading perfume blogs, I’ve read — and really enjoyed — hundreds of perfume reviews. Despite different approaches, none of the bloggers falls into the trap against which McInerney warns. The one attribute all the reviewers share is a real passion for perfume. But McInerney’s statement started me thinking about the elements of a good perfume review…

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I loved L’Artisan Parfumeur Dzing! from the moment I first smelled it, and even before letting the scent settle, I’d bought a bottle. I loved the caramelly leather and gasoline and the musky, animalic drydown. In the throes of enthusiasm, I raved to a good friend about Dzing! and sprayed it up her arm. She liked it, too. Before long, she’d bought a bottle and was telling me how often people complimented her on it.

Perhaps you are a bigger person than I am, and you would have been happy that the perfume brought her so much pleasure. Not me. When she told me she wanted to wear Dzing!, too, I was irritated. I encouraged her to try Bvlgari Black and tried to stack the deck in its favor by telling her she could buy it less expensively; it was a groundbreaking scent; I knew a really sexy guy who wore it; etc. She still wanted Dzing!…

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The first time I felt the full power of perfume was partway into my affair with Guerlain Vol de Nuit. I had been wearing the Eau de Toilette, fascinated by its almost off-putting, alcoholic first punch, driving people around me in the locker room at the gym to hold their noses, and then how it quietly absorbed into my skin and emerged as a stronger, almost soapy, but then woody, warm extension of it. Then I tried the parfum. It softened the Eau de Toilette’s edges with stealthy transitions and added a sueded layer of powder at the end. Vol de Nuit parfum was deep and unexpected, and I was love-struck. Really, little hearts flew out of my eyes.

Since then, I’ve seen comments on fragrance reviews about the emotions some perfumes inspire. One woman reported tearing up when she smelled the iris in Chanel Cuir de Russie, for instance. Lots of people talk about the sadness that Guerlain L’Heure Bleue brings. It seems crazy that something so frivolous as perfume could drive a sane, intelligent person to tears, but I’m here to tell you that art — including perfume — can be wildly powerful…

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