Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez have released the first of a projected series of quarterly updates to Perfumes: The Guide, and are offering the first issue as a free download:

Each newsletter reviews about 100 perfumes. The first free issue includes some fragrances missing in the original guide, as well as new brands. Future issues will discuss favorite discontinued perfumes and give our point of view on perfume history, culture, and developments.

You can find it here. My absolute favorite line after a very quick skim-through this morning, from the review of Guerlain's recent Cruel Gardenia:

Would be perfect if the spray button said "sucker" each time you press it.

In a letter to his friend Oskar Pollak, Franz Kafka (1883-1924) once wrote: “I believe we should only read books that bite and sting. If a book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a punch on the head, what are we reading it for?” That punch on the head, that wake-up call, was a defining element in 20th century art. In Perfumes: The Guide, authors Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez describe their favorite perfumes in similar terms: a great composition takes you by surprise, exceeds your expectations, blows you away.

Some people, of course, can’t fathom why perfumes are worthy of serious consideration in the first place, let alone why they should be reviewed in a book…

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