Last week our associate editor Elise Diamantini and I spent a while at the cologne counter at Bloomingdale’s SoHo, and we were dazzled by the skills and charisma of a saleswoman named Leslie. (Elise wrote about it here.) What we learned at Bloomingdale’s was that a good salesperson can focus you. Her stories gave the fragrances a depth that made them more interesting.

As Elise mentioned in her blog, I am working on a review of Perfumes: The Guide, a book by the illustrious chemist Luca Turin and his wife, writer Tania Sanchez. After reading just a few of the delightfully witty and detailed reviews of some familiar colognes, I wondered why a connoisseurship of scents akin to that of wine isn’t more prevalent.

There is no prominent perfume magazine, and yet perfumes—scents for men and women—are sold everywhere. Perfumes: The Guide didn’t sprout up in isolation though. The internet is teeming with perfume blogs and websites, all helmed by articulate and opinionated aficionados. (A good place to start is Basenotes.net, which boasts information and reviews of more than 12,500 fragrances.)

It’s time for a less orthodox treatment of perfumes. Many of the oldest perfumes still on the market were once considered unisex. Turin and Sanchez have an index of feminine scents that work well for men and vice-versa. We need thoughtful criticism to help men experiment and learn. And we need perfume companies to help.

“The perfume industry, in a hoary, unbroken tradition of self-defeating behavior, has done everything it can to avoid viewing its work as art,” writes Sanchez. It punishes magazines that publish bad reviews, it copies itself endlessly, monkeys with proven formulas, and its advertising focuses too much on branding (how else can I explain the fact that although I like the smell of Burberry’s new scent “The Beat,” I cannot bring myself to buy it?).

Alas, most men’s fragrances are, like much of men’s apparel, very similar. As Sanchez writes,

“Fragrances for men are mostly identical crap, designed to trap you and give you away as a lout. Don’t believe me? Smell a few dozen of them yourself and try to come to any other conclusion.”

Apparently the success of Davidoff’s Cool Water, which debuted in 1988, spawned countless imitators. Turin gives it five stars, but warns,

“The problem with successful masculines is that you associate them with the legion of aspirational klutzes who wore them for good luck. Trying to assess Cool Water without conjuring up the image of some open-shirted prat with hair gel is a bit like the Russian cure for hiccups: run around the house three times without thinking of the word wolf.”

At Bloomingdale’s, I sniffed a Chanel cologne and could think only of Drakkar Noir, that vile scent we all thought was so great in 1989. Looking for something new, I sampled YSL, and then Gucci, and then another and another and pretty soon my nose was useless and my head was aching. They all smelled basically the same to me.

The industry needs to educate men. (Lesson one: do not bathe in cologne; you will gas your friends and colleagues.) Not all men will embrace a sophisticated study of fragrances, but that’s okay. Cologne is already popular. Giving men a working vocabulary and a basic history will only help the market. It will also bring great fragrances back from obscurity as men seek out something different. As Sanchez says in the introduction, “those who talk about it buy more of it.”