CHANDLER BURR

This weekend, I spent a good deal of time discussing Chandler Burr, who, among other things, reviews scents for The New York Times. Burr has a complete understanding of perfumes and colognes. He understands the science behind the celebrity names. He appreciated the pedigree of the ingredients and considers the legacy of the creator.

He writes like this: "The result is the house’s two latest launches, Lyric Woman and Man, which are not just technically excellent but also smell like lighter-than-air, Jules Verne-like machines silvering through the sky." (From his piece on Lyric Woman by Amouage.)

To have considered scents so thoroughly is compelling. The tactile descriptions journey around the world to make olfactory nuances seem actual. It's instantly educational to read these reviews, as Burr is such a natural at measuring the science with the economic mechanisms that allow the industry of scent to exist at all.

Most of all, he's not above his own expertise, unafraid to mutilate the beast the bears his own bread. He disembowels the entire process behind the celebrity scent Danielle by Danielle Steele thusly: "[The perfumer] Loc Dong winced, but that was the way low-quality mass-market celebrity scents were created, so he gathered up the paltry number of cheap, low-quality raw materials at his disposal and, crying bitter tears, began to assemble the perfume." Finally:

For the first four seconds it smelled sort of vaguely like a kind of flower that you get in a gallon of floral-scented laundry detergent, and then for five seconds it reminded you of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” Then it evaporated, like the prose in a novel by Danielle Steel evaporated from your memory the moment you read it. It was a perfume that, instead of being made by human beings, was made by a faceless, soulless committee like Elizabeth Arden Internal Creative Team. And at that point there was nothing more to say about it.

The combination of pointed intelligence, detail, and utter fearlessness describes a type of journalism that is, frankly, too difficult to come by.