If you only read one perfume reviewer, read Persolaise.
British, opinionated, generous with credit and unforgiving of laziness. The single best entry point to fragrance criticism on the internet.
If you've spent any time looking for serious perfume writing online, you've probably bumped into Persolaise. His reviews — the man's pen-name doubles as the site — sit somewhere between perfume criticism and short literary essays, and they have done so reliably for over a decade now.
What makes them worth reading isn't that he agrees with consensus. It's that he refuses to be lazy. A perfume that the internet considers a masterpiece will get a careful, qualified rave; a perfume the internet considers a flop will get a generous re-hearing if he thinks the brief was real. He's also one of very few writers who'll tell you a perfume is boring — boring is harder to say than bad — and back it up.
What to read first
Browse his archive by perfumer rather than by perfume. He's especially good on:
- Bertrand Duchaufour — his patience with Duchaufour's stranger choices is unmatched.
- The early L'Artisan and Diptyque catalogs — his memory of the way those houses smelled in the 1990s is a primary source at this point.
- Anything Guerlain. He writes about Guerlain like a person who grew up in their archives.
He also runs an annual Awards post. Even if you don't agree with the picks — and you probably won't — the reasoning is worth more than most year-end roundups.
Why it matters for what we're doing here
A site like ours can show you shapes and accords and a hundred opinions. It cannot replace one careful reader telling you, in plain English, what a perfume is for. We send people to writers like him on purpose.
The greatest perfumes don't stop at the question 'what does this smell like?' They go further: they ask 'what does this remind me of?' and 'what could it be?'
Read him. Argue with him. He's good for you.