Using Kermode: Perfume Turns Critical
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This essay is a creative companion to my business review of perfume criticism’s effect on the industry published in the olfactive magazine NEZ issue #03

Imagine you go into a bar and start talking to a girl, guy, or whoever floats your boat. When asked your vocation, you proudly declare, “I am a perfume critic!” What kind of response do you think this would be met with? Admiring acceptance, reserved rejection, or some kind of bewilderment in the middle? Are there, in fact, many people that call themselves perfume critics at all, even when what they are engaging in is criticising and critical thinking about perfume? Without a doubt, far fewer than in the film industry and the title can take quite a bit of explaining, often with personal history and professional off-shoots required. It is certainly not a universally accepted practice.

Uncertain openings

The insinuation of sexuality in my title is no accident and bears much relevance for the stage perfume criticism currently finds itself in – with a slight sense of embarrassment, of not quite knowing how to do it ‘properly’, dispensing with (industry and literary) expectations, tentatively introducing scale and spectrum, and of strong opinions. Criticism (about anything) has the potential to bring a level of self-awareness, self-reference, and incisive appraisal generally not accessible from modes of knowledge and truth as exchanged in the mundane social world. At its best, critics can open ways of thinking that go beyond the mundane, into schemes of doubt and questioning that have the power to break conventions. As the chief film critic at The New York Times, A.O. Scott, puts it, ‘better living through criticism’, both subjectively and altruistically.

A.O. Scott

Often in this article I am quoting critics who are criticising criticism itself, so I suppose I am therefore at times criticising criticism about criticism, which is an incredibly satisfying clause to write, but does it really matter? Does it really matter for the industry? Part of the problem lies with the ‘traditional’ manner in which perfume criticism has been carried out, often making rash sensationalist statements that pose for fact and never investigate deeper than the surface. ‘Perfume as brutalist art work’? Wait! Let’s go back 1001 leaps and ask the why, how, when, what, who, and where. Generally, this is met with silence or repetition.

Mark Kermode

Rotten tomatoes

I am indebted in both form and content to Mark Kermode, chief film critic for The Observer, and his book Hatchet Job. The film industry is a great place to start in making sense of a perfume critic’s relevance and meaning for perfumery as the way films are made and consumed finds great commonality with fragrance – highly commercial products, mass-produced / replicated, global availability, both high and low artistic status, a very collaborative creation process, and an emphasis on take-away experience rather than tangible artifact. As such, I will begin my cinematic comparison as Kermode did his book’s exposition – with some high-profile bad reviews. ‘Hatchet jobs’, if you will.

Let’s start with a Persolaise review, penned on his site in 2013,

I often wonder if some perfume manufacturers enjoy having a laugh at our expense. It’s the kind of straw-gasping idea that pops into my head when I try to understand the existence of a scent like Gucci’s Made To Measure. It is so utterly generic, so completely predictable, so resolutely dull that I can’t help thinking it could only have been the result of a joke.

That is a hilarious burn.

Functioning in a very similar way to film critics’ ‘best of’ lists, it has become popular for perfume reviewers to do the same with many also including spots for the worst releases of the year such as ÇaFleureBon, Now Smell This, and The Non-Blonde. The Candy Perfume Boy gives out ‘The Sour Candy Award’ at each annum’s end, bestowed in 2016 to Diesel’s Bad – ‘the name says it all and even then it’s being generous’. Side. Is. Splitting. His infamous category award winners for the rest of the last half decade include Eros Pour Femme (Versace), Black Opium (Yves Saint Laurent), Anyway (Juliette Has A Gun), and Fame (Lady Gaga). That said, it is actually quite rare to come across negative perfume reviews. They do happen, but generally reviewers tend to concentrate on the good over the ugly, and when they do disparage the common source often arises from disdain for the boring and generic (as exemplified in The Candy Perfume Boy’s list above), rather than due to a perfume’s terrible imbalance or dissonant construction. If anything, these are factors that call for praise from the current cohort of perfume critics in search of the interesting over the same.

The other much-attacked area is fragrance marketing. Take Lizzie Ostrom writing for The Pool about Charlotte Tilbury’s Scent of a Dream,

‘Change the energy frequency of the people and environment around you’, says the sales copy … ‘With mind-altering Fleurotic frequency’ … ‘With newly discovered psycho-active ingredients of the Future’ … But what about those around me? And blokes dropping to their knees? … It was all a bit quiet on the Tube into work. No one winked at me or stood closer.

However, without doubt, the most famous bad review has to be Katie Puckrik on her YouTube channel lamenting over Secretions Magnifiques, in an episode entitled ‘World’s Most Disgusting Perfume’. So goes the transcript,

Oh, no!! [two exclamation marks needed] … (Laughter and shrill screeches of repulsion) … That’s horrifying! … I can’t believe somebody made that on purpose … It’s making my eyes water … Oh, that really is bad … It smells like a crime scene … there should be police tape around this … Why? Why! … Oh, that is really disgusting, I’m really needing a thesaurus right now … [it smells like] industrial waste … maybe a day out at Chernobyl … don’t wear this!

No words.

Second place goes to YouTubers The Fragrance Bros for their take on Lord of Goathorn by Gorilla Perfume and Jer’s jibe that ‘it would be great to spray in the summer if you want to get laid by a grizzly bear’.

Bad sports

Fragrance critic and general bastion of olfactory knowledge, Mark Behnke, declared on his ‘Welcome to Colognoisseur’ page that ‘you won’t see a negative review from me. That doesn’t mean I like everything, far from it’, justifying his approach by referring to the ‘tsunami of fragrance [releases]’ as ‘overwhelming for everyone’ and that he believes the function of blogs to be for help and advice on what people may like and why, that his personal evaluation process lasts over two days, and he wouldn’t put something he doesn’t like on his skin for that length of time.

If perfume reviewers aren’t slating brands’ work, then why is there still such hostility and suspicion of the value of fragrance reviewing? A clue lies in Irish writer Brendan Behan’s comment that ‘critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it’s done, they’ve seen it done every day, but they’re unable to do it themselves’, paralleled by Scott’s sorrow that ‘if you ask around … you will learn that a critic is, above all, a failed artist, unloading long-simmering, envious resentments on those who had the luck, talent, or discipline to succeed’. To this point, we can even track a handful of perfume writers who have recently tried their hand on the creation side, including Chandler Burr’s collaboration with Caroline Sabas and Etat Libre d’Orange on You Or Someone Like You and Fragrantica’s very own Miguel Matos’ creative direction on SP Parfums’ Funfair, Lisbon Blues, and Suntanglam with Sven Pritzkoleit. Even though transition from critic to creator is not uncommon in the film world, Kermode recently reminded his audience that The Handmaiden’s director Park Chan-wook began as a film director, turned critic, and turned back again, with the South Korean commenting, ‘I don’t think that the experience of working as a film director would necessarily make for a better film critic … Just as having worked as a film critic didn’t make me a better filmmaker’.

It is easier to understand the resistance to critics from the large distributors. The movie franchise Twilight has more in common with La Vie Est Belle than on first appearance. Kermode observes in his book that Twilight is an example of a work that is popular to dislike amongst critics, but is commercially very successful with young female teens. It is the creations for the exact same demographic that are the most scorned in perfumery also – the fruity florals and florientals aimed at post-millennial girls, as well as the same-old quasi-parodic macho tonka fougères for pimpled male first-fragrancers. That said, Kermode continued his assertion as follows, ‘I’m well aware that sneering at fans is, like patriotism, the last refuge of a scoundrel, and I’ve always been deeply suspicious of those who dismiss fan culture as somehow inherently laughable and foolish’. Not all reviewers fall under this accusation, but many do. Perfume critics, it may seem to some brands, don’t understand the mainstream, don’t appreciate blockbuster successes, and dismiss the too overtly commercial. In short, for these company heads and sales directors, the critics are out of touch.

Contemporary perfume critics also fall victim to a historical burden unfairly shackled on them by the previous generation of traditional beauty journalists. Overall, writing about fragrance in all its guises is gaining respect by the day, but is recovering from a natal disease – one of dishonesty, ignorance, and deception, if we are blunt about it. The noughties beauty journo, in turn mutated from optimistic post-war copyists and later Reaganite marketeers, was not a journalist in the way we understand the term today, probing preconception and seeking quality truths through experience; most never even smelled the fragrance they were claiming was the hottest thing going before writing their editorial, and most never smelled it afterwards either, unless they were given a free bottle. Whilst rare, this model, which Kermode summarised as breaking the ‘core tenants of proper criticism’ (in that case, film), can occasionally still be found and does nothing to further the cause of what I consider to be the first-rate progressive literature of the critics mentioned above. The point is that suspicion around what perfume critics actually do and why they are needed is still rife due to this generational blunder.

In review, I don’t think the conception of critic as bitter bystander holds up in the perfume industry. Much has been extolled in recent years about the best evaluators not being frustrated perfumers, and I believe the same can be said about the function of critics. Their job is highly unique and derives satisfaction from olfactory experience communicated to the public, rather than creation itself, or even the project management of an evaluator, through advising, comparing, describing, and interpreting, all with playfulness and improvisation. As Scott declared in a lecture given late 2016 at Tate Modern in London, ‘[criticism is a means to] decode and evaluate what we, human beings, have made in the world … tracing what happens between a work and its audience’.

From L to R: Saskia Wilson-Brown, Claus Noppeney, Bodo Kubartz, Marlen Harrison

The meaning of perfume

To conclude, I’d like to briefly discuss the role critics have to play in the meaning of perfume. In a tentative concluding remark to an Esxence 2016 panel discussion on judging and criticism in artistic perfumery, Claus Noppeney of Bern University of Applied Sciences commented,

I believe that the value is really generated here at the end [of the value chain, e.g. blogging, writing, award-giving], providing and turning something in the bottle (the juice) into something meaningful; and … the juice in the glass is in itself not meaningful. There might be a potential for meaning there, yes, but this potential has to be taken up to the surface so that it’s really visible.

The proposition Noppeney is making is problematic to say the least for the perfumer and brand owner who seek to shape and guide the creative responses to their scent; I must also admit that I have a vested interest in investigating olfactory meaning-making mechanics on olfactory terms proper, rather than through post-production cultural lenses only, simply because I love perfumery. However, I cannot agree with an overly phenomenological stance that exposes its vulnerability when applied across other arts and other interpretative practices. For me, the idea that significance and value of scent constructions are wholly instituted through an artificial matrix of culturally bound currency borrows too much from sociology and only considers the semiotic tip of the iceberg. If this were true, what I am doing and what Fragrantica is founded on is essentially pointless: fickle whims of the gullible.

Review the process of looking at a painting, listening to a piece of music, or even the most quotidian of activities such as reading the word apple. Is all interpretation in those examples an after-the-fact abstraction and manipulation of essentially neutral forms? Or can we claim any a priori justification for the pragmatics of value creation and exchange that are rooted not in the social world? Perhaps the more pertinent question which cannot be answered fully here is why have cultures attempted to find meaning in perfumery for so long, so consistently, and does that point, at least, to an essential value of the structuring structure (to take from Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the habitus) – the unconscious insistence to link olfactory freshness with cheerfulness pointing to an essential cheerfulness to (even the shadow of) bergamot? Just because the signified doesn’t reveal itself with smoke and a bang and sits in a medium-bound framework (such as language) doesn’t mean that my words don’t have any meaning, even if their shapes on the page don’t carry cosmic weight themselves. I think, with time, the same may reveal itself in perfumery.

Critics may supplement, extend, and sometimes distort meaning in fragrance, but I do not think they have deific power in fragrance cognition - they’re more like martys.

We would love to know your thoughts on this subject. What famous or funny bad perfume reviews can you think of and what point do perfume critics serve for the industry? Comment below.