Fashionista Street: The Perfect Scent

NPR did an interview with Chandler Burr about his new book, The Perfect Scent: A Year Inside the Perfume Industry in Paris and New York. Burr is the scent critic for NYT. This is radio at its best, when it reaches beyond sound through the words of spell-binding talkers who can evoke other senses. Too bad YouTube can’t embed scents and smells.

Here’s the blurb:

When Chandler Burr, scent critic for The New York Times Style Magazine, doesn’t like a perfume he doesn’t mince words.

Here’s an acid appraisal: “A cologne most appropriately worn by electrical appliances.”

Or, “This is a scent for a woman who has no taste and absolutely no interest in having any.”

Burr is enraptured by the two perfumes that he writes about in his new book The Perfect Scent.

He spent a year inside the perfume industry in New York and Paris following the developments of two scents: one by actress Sarah Jessica Parker; the other by French perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena designed to capture the essence of a garden on the Nile.

Burr landed the job of NYT scent critic, the first of a kind, after publishing a long New Yorker story called The Scent of the Nile. Nice work if you can get it.