The reviews are precise, concise, and informative. It'll not only help you understand the stuff you found in a basket at a rummage sale but will also send you on nearly impossible quests to find the Precious. This is an unparalleled resource for learning about perfumes of the past, both classic and forgotten. You'll find everything from Iris Gris to Giorgio Beverly Hills, usually with the official notes and a hint about the various reformulations. The second and largest part of the book is perfume reviews arranged by decade. Barbara Herman explains why scent is subversive, and how perfumes of yore ("yore" being anything from the turn of the 20th century to the 1990s) helped us stake a claim and make a statement about ourselves.
The first, an introduction, gives one of the best arguments and reasoning for the importance of vintage perfume and original formulations. Scent & subversion has three major parts. In her new book, Scent & Subversion, Barbara explores ten decades of perfume and how they expressed ideas, desires, cultural prejudices- anything other than a cover-up of our humanity. If you read Barbara Herman's blog, Yesterday's Perfume, you're probably a fan of vintage perfumes and what they have to offer us. If you read this blog you probably already know this.
what? that smelling freshly showered and like everyone else is going to make us more attractive? Who knows. At the same time, the advertising of these perfumes is usually very predictable: a young woman in skimpy clothes telling us. Visiting a perfume counter in an average department store today, a young person making first steps in perfume appreciation would soon learn that the purpose of wearing fragrance is to smell fresh and clean. "Scent is a path to getting closer to our senses, to instinct, and to our bodies and the earth at a time when those attachments are threatened." - Barbara Herman, Scent & Subversion, 2013
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