Last week, we gave readers the chance to ask Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez questions about perfume and their new book, The Little Book of Perfumes: The Hundred Classics. Here are their answers.

Karin: Hey Luca and Tania – we miss you!!!! Would love to see an update of The Guide. Is that a possibility?

TS: Thanks for asking. We’re both burned out on the subject at the moment. Sorry!

Angela: My question is, in your opinion which perfume house has had the most heinous reformulations? (My money is on Dior.) Which house has had the most respectful reformulations?

TS: The most heinous would be Caron. Respectful—this may not be a fair question. Dior has been abominably unlucky. (See below.) I do think that Piguet’s reconstructions of Fracas, Baghari and Futur were perfect examples of how one can do legacy perfumery with integrity. (Of course, Cravache and Visa were perfect examples of how not to.)

Robin: Angie, I have a side question that relates to yours — in their review of Diorella (2011 update) they say “No one can blame Dior’s head perfumer, Francois Demachy, for allergen regulations that have made citrus, jasmine, and oakmoss tricky to use’, but it seems to me that you’re spot on, Dior has done the worst job of any house. Just figures that they had all the iconic Edmond Roudnitska fragrances. I’d like to know if there is something about those fragrances in particular that makes them harder to update than, say, the fragrances in Chanel’s back catalog.

TS: That’s just it…

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The Little Book of Perfumes: The Hundred Classics by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez is officially on sale now — if you pre-ordered, you probably already have your copy.

If you don’t know what it is, you can find the book announcement here. I’m not going to review it (nor is anyone else around here, since we haven’t got a book reviewer at the moment), but I’ll tell you a few things I noticed right away:

The snark is gone, largely because they’re only talking about fragrances they think are good. If you liked the snark, that will be a minus, but for those who were put off by the tone, this is the volume you want.

Many of you were wondering if you needed The Little Book if you already owned one of the original two versions (Perfumes: The Guide or Perfumes: The A-Z Guide). That is, of course, up to you, but there is new material, albeit not a ton of it…

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The Little Book of Perfumes: The Hundred Classics by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez is now available for pre-order at the major online bookstores (delivery around 10/27)…

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The book includes the reviews from the hardback plus the reviews from the three quarterly updates, and a handful of new reviews and a few other changes…

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Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez have released the Spring 2009 update to Perfumes: The Guide. The update includes reviews of over 200 fragrances, and is available for download for $9.99.

Here is Tania Sanchez on Guerlain’s L’Instant Magic Elixir…

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Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez have released the second quarterly update to Perfumes: The Guide. The Winter 2008 update includes reviews of 129 fragrances plus a top 10 list for 2008, and is available for download for $9.99.

Tania Sanchez on Juicy Couture's Viva La Juicy: "I suspect that Firmenich keeps a swimming-pool-sized vat filled with a diabolically saccharine standard mixture of fruit flavor, vanilla, and musk, fixed with a tap, for perfumers to decant for clients who use pink in the packaging."

One reason why truly great smells are so often undervalued is that they are today made and distributed under the not particularly watchful gaze of a few large corporations. The cynical bean-counters in Paris and Zurich do not hesitate to tamper with old formulas, insisting on the substitution of cheap chemical compounds that approximately resemble rarer, better ingredients in an effort to reduce the dizzying cost and increase profits. They do not tell their customers when or how they do this, indeed they presume we won’t notice the difference, so fine perfume is now hopelessly entangled with the international cosmetic dollar, and ill-served by marketing and public relations. It is also manacled to crude presumptions about what is acceptably feminine or credibly masculine.

— From Smelly masterpieces, a review of Perfumes: The Guide in the UK Times Online.

But if the title lacks poetic fun, the book most certainly does not. Although the language occasionally dips into the kind of hyperbolic floweriness one perhaps must expect from enthusiastic connoisseurs, on the whole it is written with pleasing plainness and, most of all, a sense of humour. Guerlain's Mouchoir de Monsieur is lauded with an adulatory four-star review and readers are advised that "if you can wear it without thinking of Rupert Everett playing Beau Brummell, do so by all means", while something called Montana Mood Sexy is dismissed with one star and a curt "not tonight".

— From Talking scents: Hadley Freeman meets Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez, a couple united by their passion for perfume, who have written a sniffer's guide to help us distinguish the 'whippet-like' from the 'slutty'. At the Guardian.

The worst problem affecting the perfume industry, Turin says, is “a complete lack of art direction. Nobody realises that every great perfume was art-directed by somebody who had a clear vision of what he wanted, above and beyond the perfumer. There is fantastic cohesion between the smell, the bottle, the colour, the packaging — the whole thing is amazing, miraculous, not random. That doesn’t happen very often: now you’ve got some guy in marketing and a tie-in with some model. Art direction is why Serge Lutens [the famous creator of Shiseido Nombre Noire (sic)] is such a genius; he is obsessed to the point of disease”.

— Columnist India Knight talks to Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez, authors of Perfumes: The Guide, in Chemical Romance at the UK Times Online. Thanks to Bela for the link!

Fashion writer Colin McDowell will be talking to Luca Turin at a "Style Lecture" on Tuesday, September 23, 2008 at 6 pm in London. The event is open to the public (tickets are £20); see the details here.

Each newsletter reviews about 100 perfumes. The first free issue includes some fragrances missing in the original guide, as well as new brands. Future issues will discuss favorite discontinued perfumes and give our point of view on perfume history, culture, and developments.

You can find it here. My absolute favorite line after a very quick skim-through this morning, from the review of Guerlain's recent Cruel Gardenia:

Would be perfect if the spray button said "sucker" each time you press it.