Chandler Burr

The Emperor of Scent tells of the scientific maverick Luca Turin, a connoisseur and something of an aesthete who wrote a bestselling perfume guide and bandied about an outrageous new theory on the human sense of smell. Drawing on cutting-edge work in biology, chemistry, and physics, Turin used his obsession with perfume and his eerie gift for smell to turn the cloistered worlds of the smell business and science upside down, leading to a solution to the last great mystery of the senses: how the nose works.

From the New York Times perfume critic, a stylish, fascinating, unprecedented insider's view of an industry and its charismatic characters No journalist has ever been allowed into the ultrasecretive, highly pressured process of originating a perfume. But Chandler Burr, the New York Times perfume critic, spent a year behind the scenes observing the creation of two major fragrances. Now, writing with wit and elegance, he juxtaposes the stories of the perfumes--one created by a Frenchman in Paris for an exclusive luxury-goods house, the other made in New York by actress Sarah Jessica Parker and Coty, Inc., a giant international corporation. We follow Coty's mating of star power to the marketing of perfume, watching Sex and the City 's Parker heading a hugely expensive campaign to launch a scent into the overcrowded celebrity market. Will she match the success of Jennifer Lopez? Does she have the international fan base to drive worldwide sales?In Paris at the elegant Hermès, we see Jean Claude Ellena, his company's new head perfumer, given a he must create a scent to resuscitate Hermès's perfume business and challenge le monstre of the industry, bestselling Chanel No. 5. Will his pilgrimage to a garden on the Nile supply the inspiration he needs? The answer lies in Burr's informative and mesmerizing portrait of some of the extraordinary personalities who envision, design, create, and launch the perfumes that drive their billion-dollar industry.

"Chandler Burr's challenging first novel is many things: a glimpse into Hollywood culture, an argument about religious identity, a plea for the necessity of literature. This is a roman that needs no clefs." —Washington Post. New York Magazine calls You or Someone Like You, "The highbrow humanist name-dropping book of the summer." The remarkable first novel by Chandler Burr, the New York Times scent critic and author of The Perfect Scent, is funny, smart, and provocative—an extraordinarily ambitious work of fiction that succeeds on many different levels. It is a book David Ebershoff, (author of The 19th Wife) enthusiastically recommends "for anyone who defiantly clings to the belief that a book can change our lives."

An investigation of the biological origins of sexual orientation examines the latest breakthroughs in the fields of neurobiology, endocrinology, and genetics.

An exquisite exploration of the relationship between Christian Dior and perfumes, celebrating sixty-five years of inspiration, innovation, and style.

A Year Inside The Perfume Industry In Paris and New York.The New York Times perfume criticyes, you read that rightfollows the creation of two industry-defining perfumes. While Burr approaches his beat with healthy skepticism, he�s also capable of flowery language, describing a perfume as smelling like early evening on an island where it is always summer. It�s this mixture of hard-nosed business writing and flights of olfactory fancy that makes the text improbably exhilarating. Split between the twin capitals of fashion, and therefore of the perfume industry, Burr�s account tracks the development of two new scents, each a high-stakes crapshoot. The New York fragrance was celebrity-driven. To create Sarah Jessica Parker Lovely, the actress spent an impressive amount of time with beauty-product manufacturer Coty�s corporate perfumers trying to create a scent that would not only capture her essence (don�t they actually seem to have done it) but would survive in an increasingly volatile $31-billion market. Un Jardin sur le Nil, the more traditionally designed Parisian fragrance, was revolutionary in its own way. Seeking a higher profile in the lucrative perfume market, Herms hired Jean-Claude Ellena, one of the professional ghosts who actually make the scents sold under designers� names, to be its first-ever in-house perfumer. The astoundingly complex struggle to define and refine Nil, first reported by Burr in a 2005 New Yorker article, centered on an ephemeral conceit of green mangoes on the Nile. Lovely comes across here as a far more personal scent, though that might be a subjective judgmentthe author seems a little star-struck by SJP. Nonetheless, Burr sharply evokes the intoxicating, often infuriating mix of precise science and artistic vision necessary to create a perfume, aided by his impressively calibrated BS detector and ability to unearth the industry�s many dirty little secrets. An unusually grounded depiction of a business built largely on artifice.