Chandler Burr | Five Favorite Scents | February 2006

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Rose Barbare | Guerlain

Mitsouko | Guerlain

In 2004, the Creative Director of Guerlain, Sylvaine Delacourte, approached several perfumers, among them Francis Kurkdjian, with the proposition of creating a new Guerlain feminine. What was interesting about the "perfume brief" (the perfume's conceptual blueprint) was that there was no brief, at least not in a traditional sense. Delacourte wanted, she said quite concisely, a concept of rose. She stipulated a rose not vapid, not romantic, and not sweet. But what it could be? No guidance. "Give us your concept— whatever you want." Kurkdjian not only created Rose Barbare, a sublime rose, in three weeks, he did it in one, single modification.

The concept of Rose Barbare is a contemporary reinterpretation of Guerlain's 1919 Mitsouko, one of the greatest chypres ever. A chypre perfume is the most strictly parametered of any classic category, built on a mathematical equation of three precise materials: mousse de chêne (oak moss) + ciste labdanum (which comes from a bush and smells, bizarrely enough, like a wild rutting animal) + patchouli. And then all the usual theological arguments: Must there or must there not also be a citrusy bergamot top, etc. Jacques Guerlain built Mitsouko by breaking the power of the oak moss with a natural jasmine and, more significantly, a new synthetic molecule that had recently appeared. Jukov and Schestakow might have patented aldehyde C-14 (actually not an aldehyde but a lactone; it's real name is gamma-undecalactone) in 1908, but Michael Edwards reports that it had been available from other suppliers, and it was probably Firmenich that introduced Jacques Guerlain to the molecule in the form of a base it called Persicol, which it had put on the market in 1908. C-14 was a marvel, a fruity, aromatic, delicious scent that gave ripe peach skin. Guerlain plugged C-14 into the equation perfectly (the rumor is, actually, similar to Chanel 5, that he in fact accidentally overdosed the stuff; who knows), and Mitsouko became a thing of subtle opulence, strength and balance and silken twilight.

Kurkdjian took Mitsuoko's idea and spun it forward. Instead of jasmine, he built with rose as the steel skeleton of this machine, an extremely expensive Turkish rose absolute from the excellent Grasse-based scent materials producer Robertet. The rose/patchouli accord features in Clinique's 1971 Aromatics Elixir by IFF perfumer Bernard Chant, and Kurkdjian himself had done a run with it in his Narcisco Rodriguez. Here, he welded on the C-14 for the peach, then attached aldehyde C-11, which gives at once a certain rosiness and a tiny zinging sharp. Then Firmenich's Hedione and some musks. The result is one of the most stunning roses on the market. That this thing was built in one mod doubles the effect. Here is a scent that sweeps over you like the shadow of an Airbus 340, vast and utterly smooth in a mixture of light and dark, impressive in its wingspan, but it has is a tactile component that is eye-narrowing, like running your fingers lightly over 000-gauge sandpaper. Paris is a gorgeous rose, and Shiseido's White Rose is a luminous one, but Rose Barbare, with this texture like a sheet of graphite, is the one whose skin you can feel.

www.guerlain.com

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Eau Parfumée au thé vert | Bulgari

The story of Ellena's Eau de Bulgari is one of the stranger episodes in perfumery. Ellena had had his first huge success with First, a classic French fragrance created in the classic way—the house had directed him toward this and that as usually happens—but by 1989 he felt strongly that it was time, as he put it, "for me to show that I have something to say in perfumery, not just what you ask me for." Ellena and his wife Susannah are serious lovers of tea and usually bought at the house Mariage Freres, which at that point hadn't become as famous as it is now. He went often, and loved the smells—without, perhaps, exaggerating at all, the experience of walking into a Mariage Freres store is the most exhilarating olfactory experience it is possible to have— and after making his purchases, he would go back to his lab and, all but compelled, write short formulae, the scents he'd been buying running in his head. He asked them one day if he could smell all their tea. They agreed, and he spent a whole morning smelling all hundred of the large metal canisters. He was developing an idea, refining it to a point. The astuce, the trick, was fundamentally to mate a synthetic called ionone, which till 1992 had as far as Ellena knew been used only to make the scent of violets, and hedione, which is a molecule synthesized from a molecule found naturally jasmine and has a very heady jasmine smell. These two together made tea, though not a particular kind of tea; it was, as Ellena would be careful to explain to you, the concept of tea.

He approached Yves Saint Laurent with the idea, but (according to Ellena) they said, No, it’s not for us, it’s too creative. So he went around the houses with it, urging them, “I think it’s really something new, something that will work.” I was, he told me, really convinced.

At that moment, knowing nothing of this, the Italian jeweler Bulgari approached him. They explained that they had been envisioning a nice fragrance that, perhaps, would be sold in some quiet corner of their store, an eau de cologne maybe. Its primary role would be to perfume the boutiques, give them a pleasant smell, though yes, certainly, it would also be worn by the few clients who might buy some now and then. They did not at all think of it as a product that would bring in money; this was simply about another part of the identity of Bulgari. Ellena brought them his draft of the tea scent. Eau Parfumée au thé vert de Bulgari, which became the name of the perfume he ultimately did for them, is a smell as deep and strong and clear as Turkish seawater. The tea is extremely strong, a small amount of the smoothness of Darjeeling but, in much greater proportion, a rough, potent black tea from China; people refer to it as a green tea, but it has only the freshness of green tea, not the scent. There is a vaporous trace of old wood smoke from the fire used to boil this very fresh water, and at the same time the scent is shot through with this freshness, which is why, as Ellena intended, it smells like tea and, simultaneously, it doesn't. His idea was not to copy reality. His idea is to transform reality. The manager at Bulgari Parfums called Ellena one day with a strange tone of voice to report that, odd, but at the Bulgari store in New York they were selling ten bottles a day. At $350 per bottle. Once they realized what they had they sent it into the market and it made buckets of money. This was a perfume never meant to be distributed.

www.bulgari.com

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Un Jardin en Méditerranée | Hermès

In fragrances recently the word "fresh" has become, in a weird unfortunate Jekyl-in-the-direction-of-Hyde transformation, the exact opposite of what it's supposed to mean. I'm a total fan of synthetics (everyone who is familiar with perfume's state of the art is a total fan of synthetics), and there have been some excellent new contributions to the fresh concept— being synthetic and smelling synthetic are two utterly different propositions— but in many scents and at many houses they've now gone nuts, into a virtual reality where "fresh" becomes a steroided fist of laundry detergent coming at you. "Fresh," purified and returned to its roots, is an adjective that could almost be regarded as a synonym for free, and Un Jardin en Méditerranée is an exquisitely free scent. I was at a reception in Paris, and a young man (happily Hermès designates this a mixed scent; knock yourselves out, guys) came over to talk to me. Before he opened his mouth I nailed it. He was impressed. In truth, it's not tough. Un Jardin En Méditerranée is a singular balancing act, carefully calibrated by Hermès perfumer Jean Claude Ellena, between a limpidly authentic freshness—not "green," not the molecule calone of l'Eau d'Issey and it's million knockoffs, not, thank Christ, P&G laundry powder, but of pure, pure air and a light hint of fruit trees at a slight remove. It is shot through with sunlight. It is spacious. It is pure.

www.hermes.com

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Chanel 19 | Chanel

Iris is one of the most inherently tasteful scents in the world, the olfactory equivalent of grey crepe wool and pearls. Chanel 19, which is covered in iris like a layer of the glowing blue noctilucent clouds that hover on the edge of space, is both an inherently strange scent and one of the most correct fragrances in the world. Perfumer Henri Robert specified 1% of iris in the formula, but it creates 19 as the curves and lines of the body of a classic Jaguar molds the eye and registers the Jaguar form. Robert set the iris body on a strong chassis of three materials, principally galbanum, an oil from an Iranian grass that is a terrific, almost weird green, a fresh, growing organic matter that packs a punch. To that he welded two excellent Firmenich molecules, a synthetic wood and Firmenich's great construction material Hedione (the molecule methyl dihydrojasmonate), which also powers Eau Sauvage. The result is a masterpiece. 19 is the smell of an iris in a slender glass vase inside a smooth platinum-colored Jag. It's been described as cold, almost steely, and a bit stark. This is, in a sense, accurate; it smells like a dagger of softness in a hard titanium sheath of aldehydes—but it's warm too, when the light hits it the right way. A 50-something woman I know who lives across town from me on the Upper West Side has been on 19 since she was sixteen, and what surprises is not that she's worn it so long but that a girl that young would appreciate 19's classicism. This is an adult scent. It asserts itself. It is mature, and there is a quality of certainty that is wonderful. And inexorably correct.

www.chanel.com

Chandler Burr | Five Favorite Scents | January 2006

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As a rule, to any perfume sold as a "masculine" (or "pour homme" or "him" or "lui" or whatever the Orwellian commercial designation), one can generally attach the words "poorly designed product inferior to its feminine counterpart in ingenuity and creativity." Or just: "crap." Set aside for a moment the fact that only dolts swallow the gendered-perfume gimmick and obey some marketing guru's, "This is for boys, this is for girls." (Real adults wear whatever they want.) The ratio of good to bad among masculines is laughable—if they put out this many bad feminines, the industry would implode—and so, in general, are the masculines. Look at the Kenneth Cole scents or Z by Zegna: Smelling them is like smelling fresh insecticide while locked in an aluminum cell.

Which is why four new masculines— Dior Homme | Dior, Terre d'Hermès | Hermès, Cannabis Santal | Fresh, and Black XS | Paco Rabanne— are so surprising. They aren't good. They're stellar. These are innovatively engineered, beautifully built, ingenious scents, and, mated with one of the great overlooked masculines, M7 Fresh | Yves Saint Laurent, these things constitute the cutting edge. The fact that Fresh, which doesn't in principle believe in gendering its scents, is directing this to men is basically both a dare and a come on. Every man should step up to the plate. But then, so should every woman.

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Dior Homme | Dior

With Dior Homme, IFF perfumeur Olivier Polge has not only created a stunning scent. He has (under Hedi Slimane's creative direction; Slimane also designed the bottle, which is perfect, the most handsome masculine fragrance bottle in, oh, the history of the world) created what may some day be seen as a seminal piece of work. Polge has created a subtly spectacular iris. The aesthetic accomplishment belongs to him; much, however, if not all of Dior Homme's "meaning"—its impact on the industry, on the state of the art, its challenge to accepted norms—is due to Dior for a very simple reason: Dior is putting this on the market as a masculine. That, of itself, is brilliant. And admirable and cutting edge and so on. This scent that would be gorgeous on any woman smart enough to wear it. Moreover, Dior briefed this guy. In 2005 alone, Polge has demonstrated a career's worth of talents. He did Flower Bomb for Viktor & Rolf and showed he had showmanship. He did Boss In Motion Green Edition and showed— it is a soulless metallic robot perfectly calibrated to the totalitarian Boss collection— he had technical skill and the ability to incarnate a style. He did Dior Homme and showed he was an artist.

Iris, handled correctly, is liquid good taste. It also, incidentally, does not exist. It is impossible for technical reasons to wring any natural scent from iris flowers, and all iris scents are created with synthetic molecules: Ionones, inexpensive but quite nice, irones, very expensive and gorgeous, and marvelous orris aldehydes can simulate terrific iris scents. Here are four masterpieces built on the smell of iris: Chanel 19, the most abstract, Bois d'Iris by the niche French house The Different Company, the most severe, the most austere, and Iris Poudre by Pierre Bourdon for Frédéric Malle's collection, the most velvet, thick, luxurious. The least severe is Dior Homme. Polge has used a light, assured, masterly touch that turns this iris into the sheerest sheet of crisp silk, as close to perfection as it's possible to get. It has the grace of a Japanese maple and the cool of a leopard. It is the most elegant thing I've smelled in years.

www.dior.com

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Terre d'Hermès | Hermès (March 2006)

The most striking aspect of Terre d'Hermès is that Jean Claude Ellena, Hermès' in-house perfumer, has created something that, more than any of these five, paints a scent that could be (not, I will pointedly note, should be) identified as being "for men." This means nothing. Miss Dior is as animalic as a truck driver on the New Jersey Turnpike where this scent is not at all, and Obsession (for women) with its deep voice and muscular forearms is twice as butch as Terre will ever be. So what. Terre d'Hermès is a column of wood and stone, enveloped in softness. (He told me, "I wanted to create a masculine scent that actually smelled of human tenderness instead of soap.") It may be most precise to say what Ellena has not done. He has not put on a toque and created a gourmand, although at about an hour in, Terre reveals a wonderful dessert fingerprint– not caramel and not candy but the tart fructose you'd taste in starfruit. He has not (thank Christ) manufactured anything like those battery-powered interchangeable sleek chrome toys marketed by Zegna. He has not produced anything that smells like indoors. Terre— "earth" in French— is a metaphorical triumph because it transfers to you the earth's essential scents, the raw hearts of trees, the smell of rock and the idea of forest and the sweetness of sunlight-warmed human skin covered with sunlight-warmed dust. Its power is in its purity. Quietly remarkable.

www.hermes.com

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Cannabis Santal | Fresh

"Everybody must get stoned," said Bob Dylan, and Cypress Hill quoted Dylan recently, with the blackest, sleekest hip-hop backbeat, asphalt and chain link fence that pump through your iPod headphones:

I got data on crazy shit for round the corner you know
The homeboys and the brothers be slangin’ this shit
But anyway, (everybody must get stoned)
I don’t know but that shit sounds good to me

Me too. It is now Fresh's turn to sing this song, and it is a serious regret that Cannabis Santal is not downloadable from iTunes.com because the world would be a better place. What Fresh is slanging is a creation of Fresh CEO Lev Glazman, the only Creative Director I know of who actually goes into the lab and handles materials, and Givaudan perfumer Caroline Sabas, and— categorical statement— I have never smelled a scent that sought to invoke a thing (an object, a concept) and succeeded with such complete success on the technical level and such total elegance of style. Marijuana's smell is one of the most distinctive and powerful in the world (and then of course there are all the experiential semiotics: sex, parents, 1970s rock concerts), but it is a scent that is intoxicating by association, not by actual smell; pot smoke is usually acrid, yet at the same time overly sweet and cloying, as if it knew everyone was in on the joke and was trying to further ingratiate itself. Glazman and Sabas have elegantly solved this problem by choosing to give us the smell of unburned leaf—a dime bag of fragrance, as it were—so green and vibrant and alive that it smells like it's still on the plant (live marijuana leaves in fact smell of very little, but the concept comes through nicely) mixed with one of the choicer varietals, dried: Panama Red, perhaps, or Acapulco gold, African black, Chicago green, Kentucky blue. The scent is green and muscular and it lifts off the skin in billows as if powered by delta9-tetrahydrocannabinol. (I'd love to know if THC has a smell.) This perfume is instantly familiar, and yet it is slightly displaced, in this case by housing it inside an olfactory container of creamy sandalwood. If Thai Buddhist monks smoked ganja in their ancient wooden Bangkok temples on warm tropical nights and you happened to walk by at 2am, this is what you would smell. Glazman and Sabas have taken cannabis sativa and somehow made of it a material essence of art, and the result is pure magic. There should be a law. Everybody must get stoned.

www.fresh.com

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M7 Fresh | Yves Saint Laurent

Of all the major houses, it strikes me that the Yves Saint Laurent collection is the most variable in hits and misses. The Gucci Group, which owns the YSL perfumes license, has actually done quite a good job on balance: a series of unremarkable modest successes is never as desirable as a collection that includes some disasters but, at the same time, some stellar successes. Case in point: M7. The original provokes, more than any other release, the deep question: What… were they thinking…? Here are two of the most masterful perfumers on the planet, Alberto Morillas and Jacques Cavallier, under (in theory anyway) Chantal Roos and Tom Ford's artistic direction, and they create the smell of a smashed Fiat engulfed in flames in the emergency lane of the A6, an alarming chemical storm of burnt rubber, charred metal, singed leather, and a touch of hot polycarbon. This is not, actually, a criticism: It was (I mean this) a well-constructed, thoughtfully built car in flames. But the thing came out in 2002, and it's not that it wasn't a hit—it wasn't listed anywhere in the top 20 in either Europe or the U.S. in '02 or '03. That is a disaster. But Gucci had invested so much in the brand (the name stands for YSL's 7^th masculine scent) that they had Morillas and Cavallier do a flanker, and: the boys score. Not to confuse, but I should say that I would not wear M7 Fresh, and for a very simple reason: I'm not a smoke guy, at least not yet. But this is not about my personal preferences. It is a simple acknowledgment that the two have created a smoke that has none of the radioactive fallout of its father while sporting all the aesthetic punch. This is the most enticing smoke, a well-designed smoke, hipster without its hipsterness being at all rebarbative, dark enough for a bar yet light enough for snowboarding, pro-active and relaxed at the same time. Where the Costes hotel's smoke is a model with an attitude, M7 Fresh is a nice waiter with a great haircut and a sexy smile. He's so cool, you just want to take the guy home.

www.ysl.com

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Black XS | Paco Rabanne

With this scent Olivier Cresp, who was already fast becoming one of Firmenich's Most Valuable Players, hits Michael Jordan status. This is a Puig product—Puig, the Spanish licensor—and Puig, which has been so expert at creating a feminine collection for Carolina Herrera that is a trifecta, at once elegant, refined, and contemporary, has managed this project beautifully. Black XS uses two terrific Firmenich captive synthetic molecules. The first is Norlimbanol (1-(2,2,6-trimethyl-cyclohexyl)-3-hexanol), which by itself is one of the most amazing scents around, a genius molecule that should be worth its weight in gold; Norlimbanol gives you, quite simply, the smell of extreme dryness, absolute desiccation, and if when you smell it, you'll understand that instantly—the molecule is, by itself, a multi-sensory Disney ride. The other is Z11, a lovely dry wood scent, and then there's a little Muscenone, an extremely expensive synthetic that is almost indescribable. Cresp says the idea was electrical current, and it has produced something beautifully different, unplaceable, and instantly mesmerizing, as if an experimental rock album were both authentically innovative and yet compulsively listenable. Smelling this is like diving into a pool of summer cloud in a blossoming lemon grove. It is so blissfully free of hairy-chested machismo, sports car attitude, and urban slickness that the result would be shocking if the scent didn't embrace you like a friendly judo champion. In the end, the sensation is sweet and simple as can be: Wearing Black XS feels like being liked by nice, cool people.

www.blackxs.com

Chandler Burr | Five Favorite Scents | September 2005

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Ambre Narguilé | Hermès

It is a benefit of this job that Jean-Claude Ellena mixed up a small bottle of this for me in the perfume lab he had just created near Grasse to serve as the nursery for Hermès' future elixirs. This is the second scent that Ellena, now Hermès' perfumer, created for the house— or the third, fourth, or fifth, depending on how you count; his first was the exquisite Un Jardin en Méditerranée, followed by the Hermèssences, a collection of four super-luxury (and super-expensive) scents, of which Ambre Narguilé is one. It is not merely the best; there is simply nothing like it on the market, period. And no one will ever do it as well again. Start with the technical brilliance, which is jaw-dropping—this is a costly scent that runs like an atomic clock. It has a titanium-like power, a ride as smooth as a Mercedes 500 S on brand-new Pirellis, and a sillage so performant you'd think it was built by Cal Tech engineers. Those are the specs; it is the subjective artistry of the work that is so masterful owning a bottle should be a legal, if not a religious, obligation. It is one of the two or three greatest culinary perfumes ever created. Smelling this is like experiencing not banana, nor caramel, nor whipped cream, nor the lightest and most supple tan rich leather driving glove; it is a heated wash through the bloodstream of those concepts wrapped in a very, very blond leaf of the most lightly cured tobacco. It is edible, but it is not sweet, and it is not salt; it is both. And it weaves the peculiar sorcery of rendering food deeper, richer, better than it would be removed from the presence of this golden smack. I travel with Jean-Claude's bottle in my dop kit along with some benzodiazepine for long flights, and like some strange drug, I put it on before any serious dinner. You have never truly experienced a meal until you've done so with three drops of Ambre Narguilé on each wrist. But it changes you as well. It is a scent that alters and heightens taste. It is mesmerizing culinary alchemy. It warms the air. It renders you mouthwatering.

www.hermes.com

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Alberto Absolu | S-Perfumes

Nobi Shioya, the Catholic Japanese sculptor who incorporates scent in ingenious ways in his art, has managed the astounding trick of creating a fascinating commercially available (at Collette in Paris, for example) perfume collection under the label S-Perfume. But it is one of his pure art scents that I find particularly breathtaking. The work, an abstract olfactory sculpture titled /7S/ for the seven deadly sins and exhibited January 24 through March 8 2003 at the Cleveland State University Art Gallery (the work's viewable aspects can be seen on Shioya's artwork site www.compressedart.com), was exceedingly complex. Its fundamental aspect involved the incarnation of each sin in scent, the scents divided up among seven perfumers from the scent creation company Firmenich. Thierry Wasser did Sloth, Harry Fremont produced a conceptual spin on Avarice, Ilias Ermenidis did an expert job with Gluttony, Annie Buzantian took Envy, Annick Menardo's brilliant Anger would by itself be a wildly successful artistic work, Alberto Morillas took in (expert) hand Lust, and Jacques Cavallier got Pride. As a sort of artistic chaser not necessarily intrinsic to the work but of immense interest to those of us thrilled with the psychological profiling of some of the world's best perfumers, Shioya asked each of his scent artists to create their self portrait; Morillas'—he is acknowledged as one of the preeminent perfumers of his generation—is called Alberto Absolu, and it is utterly glorious. I love it so wildly and it is at the same time so unusual while managing to be so utterly un-strange that it is virtually impossible to describe. It is rich without money, honey without sweet, fresh without green, masculine without male. It shifts. It is sunlight without any heat at all (in fact it is a rather cool scent, though its luminescence is not blue but rather, oddly, golden yellow). Even as it gives pleasure, it forces its audience to ask of it: What the hell, exactly, are you doing? It is of course a work of art in the literal sense, but a work whose outstanding characteristic is being, like a movie or recreational drugs or a good story, an experience one can simultaneously do in one's head like a math problem and lose oneself in like sleep.

www.s-perfume.com

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Mûre et Musc Cologne | l'Artisan Parfumeur

Of all the scents in the l'Artisan Parfumeur collection, there is one that seems to work—with a consistency and force that never fail to surprise me— on an instinctual level with people. The original Mûre et Musc was the way I entered the l'Artisan line in the way you sort of blunder in (which I literally did, into the small shop at 32, rue du Bourg-Tibourg in the Marais in Paris) to a house's lineup and find a single scent that makes sense and speaks to you. And suddenly you have an anchor, and you start discovering their other things. Of the other l'Artisan scents, Thé Pour Un Été and Verte Violette and the cream of Jour de Fête and one could go on are all obsessions, but I was with my friend Julien at a café near the BHV department store and sprayed on the new Mûre et Musc Cologne. You could see his eyes widen. "Man, Í love that!" There are three— the Concentré came out in between, and like me, he started with the original, but the Cologne version… this thing is another story. I've never liked eaux de cologne, the same old combination of fresh citrus and some spice for dark contrast. This stuff manages to revolutionize the category. To me (and Rémi Cléro, l'Artisan's CEO, thinks I'm nuts, but so it goes) Mûre et Musc has always been the scent of wine making. Ripe sugar-laden fruit, rich gumminess of yeast smell, wood of oak barrels in some warm, moist place, the gnac-gnac piquancy on the palette of fermentation. The Cologne takes all of that and plunges it into a stiff breeze, slicing it up like a metal knife, the metal atoms clinging to it. All the brace and surprising electricity of an eau de cologne (I was in a restaurant on Lexington in midtown with my friend Jennifer, and her eyes widened at it, "Wow, I love that!") but with what those guys never have: depth, an utterly uncloying sweetness, richness. It's clean with all sorts of interesting dirty stuff underneath, and there's something about this thing. I was in a café with my friend Francesca, I got out a bottle and sprayed it, her eyes widened with amazement, she said, "Oh, I love that!"…

www.lartisanparfumeur.com

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Lovely | Sarah Jessica Parker

Lovely is two perfumes working quietly together to simulate one, a hidden risk, successfully negotiated to a degree I suspect even Parker doesn't fully realize. This is a piece of extremely interesting technical work. It is, in its most immediate incarnation, an instantly legible, placeable perfume— "perfume" in the classic French tradition of Hermès' Caleche where you say "The perfume she's wearing smells amazing" (she's put it on) rather than, say, the modernist works of scent art done so well by Fresh and Jo Malone in which a material—a pear, a cup of sake, a peel of tree bark—is transformed into a fragrance and you say "She smells amazing" (the thing seems to emanate from her). One doesn't "smell of" Lovely. One wears it. One puts it on. Lovely is the lightest olfactory party dress of powder and sweet, the scent equivalent of the terrific wrap of soft floating mesh fabric I saw last summer enveloping the shoulders of a young woman, worn elegantly through the East Village streets. One notices that Lovely wrap.

This is why it takes a bit of time to notice that Parker has, in fact, gotten what she wanted, though in a very astute way. By the time I met her and she confirmed to me the structure of the initially invisible infrastructure of this thing, I'd been wearing Lovely for a week. If you pay attention, the scent reveals that structure, a sheath of light built around a core of dark, the scent of the skin of a warm, humid, human body.

I doubt Sarah Jessica knew the perfumery term "animalic"— I forgot to ask her about it— but she had the concept, and she found a way to express it. Taking Coty's (probably wise) marketing advice, she created a lilting perfume welded to an invisible platform as masculine as it is feminine, animalic, hardcore, every so slightly sweaty. The woman we see and the woman we don't. At first.

www.sarahjessicaparkerbeauty.com

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Pomegranate Noir Cologne | Jo Malone

I recently surprised Jo Malone—which, frankly, surprised me—by telling her that in my opinion, the central aspect of her scent aesthetic is the quality of light. ("Hm!" she said. Considered it. "I've never thought about it as such…") Isn't it utterly clear? Malone's genius is a marvelous quality that is not weightlessness— it's something much more startling: weight that floats, hovers in the air. Solidity shot through with light. Think about the Amber & Lavender Cologne, the Grapefruit Cologne, the French Lime Blossom. I was sitting with Jo, talking about this glass roof sensation I feel when I smell her work, and she frowned. "In my perfumes?" Yes, yes, all the light, I said, and hesitated; we seemed, suddenly, to have missed each other. When you say light, I asked her carefully, do you mean light the antonym of heavy or light as photon radiation? "Oh," she said immediately, "the antonym of heavy." Ah: thus the problem. I'd been thinking of luminescence, she, of heft. She cocked her head for an instant, crisply pulled out a small bottle. "I'm not going to tell you its name," she said, "it's our next launch. But you tell me whether you find your glass roof." She sprayed it on my arm, sat back.

You bring the arm to your nose, and you think: Wait...

What is light to you? What is Jo Malone? This perfume is the scent of the darkness that inhabits the corners of the paintings by the Dutch Masters. You know Rubens' Self-Portrait? The rich, rich, purple, luscious dark that surrounds that illuminated head watching you, that bright white collar floating in the warm blackness? Ruben's dark is not the cold heaviness of the void. It is the deep warmth of all that is there but, simply, unseen. That is this scent. Think of photons, particles with energy and momentum, yet, quixotically, no mass at all. They're all around us—they are light itself. What is amazing about this fragrance is that it is at once utterly different from Jo's bright work and, yet ("Oh! the antonym of heavy"), characteristically massless. Jo Malone, queen of light, has created the weightless scent of a photon.

www.jomalone.com

Chandler Burr | Five Favorite Scents | December 2004

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Angel | Thierry Mugler

Marketed as a feminine, in reality as unique as a person, this utterly marvelous scent is, to quote Luca Turin, "brilliant, at once edible (chocolate) and refreshingly toxic (caspirene, coumarin)." Created by the legendary perfumeur Yves de Chiris (his perfumeur great, great-grandfather was a character in Patrick Susskind's novel "Perfume"), Angel doesn't even bother to pretend to pay lip service to categories. Don't let its initial personality startle you; wearing it is like having a conversation, because this thing will talk to you for hours on various subjects, sometimes chocolate/ cinnamon, sometimes fresh ginger and spices in cream, and sometimes the heady, symphonic interior of the Greenwich Village flower shop (irises, lilies, roses, their cut stems and leaves) where Meryl Streep bought bouquets in "The Hours" mixed in with the scent of the concrete and car exhaust of the New York street that enters with every customer. I have dined in fine restaurants with Angel on, and it was the most delicious thing the entire evening. Wear it and see.

www.thierrymugler.com

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Vera Wang | Vera Wang

There are some fragrances that are good in any circumstances and some that lend themselves to certain times and places. Wearing anything Guerlain to play tennis would be weird (while wearing Tommy Girl to play tennis would be perfect). It depends on what the perfume evokes and how you want to use it. Vera Wang has created a fragrance that is simply elegance in a bottle. Smelling it is like watching a beautiful woman in a Grace Kelly gown walk leisurely past and give you a radiant smile. Since this is a self-assured, quiet, thoroughly American elegance, it's relaxed, and you could use it at the office if you wanted. But I'd hold it in reserve for evening. You smell this, you stand up a little straighter, your eyes a little brighter in the smooth air, the jazz combo sound flowing a little richer. Gorgeous.

www.verawang.com

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Quartz | Molyneux

When I was seventeen, I used to make pocket money by selling perfumes at a little French perfumery in Georgetown, in Washington DC, where I grew up. One of the scents I loved was Quartz, which I bought (and still buy) for my mom. This is not grandiose perfumery; Quartz is a fragrance of simple loveliness and grace marked by a quality of absolute clarity. If you like those things, you will like Quartz. Its heart is orange blossom (I'm told), Molyneux markets it as a feminine, and it is a classic female fragrance. And I can tell you that a football player jock high school roommate of mine sprayed some on one morning as a joke (this was at boarding school, I had a bottle of it) and that afternoon hunted me down, gripped my arm, and muttered, "Where can I get this shit?" In our AP English class alone he'd had five girls nuzzle him as they leaned in, astonished and delighted, to smell his neck. They couldn't get enough of him in this thing; he couldn't get enough of it.

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Hanae Mori for Men | Hanae Mori

What amazes about Hanae Mori's creation is that it manages to be at once elegant, enticing, understated, and (crucially) just ever so slightly odd (the citrus, which you only perceive from time to time). This is not a showy fragrance. It is calm and classic and subtle, a scent that both bathes you in soothing limes and cloaks you in the most tasteful charcoal suit you've ever worn. Hanae Mori for Men will always be correct. It will always "work." It's arguably a perfect fragrance. I would say that it is also arguably much better on women than on men, but I don't believe that; it's for anyone who appreciates its superb qualities.

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Paris | Yves Saint Laurent

Someone once said to me that of all the perfumes they know, the perfume brief in which YSL described to the perfumer what they hoped to get out of Paris must have been the shortest brief ever written: "Make us the most gorgeous rose perfume in the world, over and out." In my view, they've done it. Paris is a gigantically wonderful rose. In fact, what I like about it is that it is not anything else. It pretty much dispenses with top notes and bottom notes, just explodes onto the scene and envelopes you and starts radiating unabashed luxury. (Jo Malone's got her own rose, which is jaw-dropping, an updated modernistic scent that is basically Paris smelled inside London's sleek metal-and-glass Waterloo station, and Frédéric Malle has his, the exquisitely forthright Une Rose.) Paris has, to my mind, the most class in the YSL lineup. And it stakes out another position too: Contrast Paris to, for example, YSL's Baby Doll; almost strange that YSL would decide to market a perfume that is essentially a millimeter away from Fiorucci's super-sweet olfactory joke (and I like Baby Doll, but it is, with it's super-sweet pinkness, meant to make you laugh). Clearly the YSL people simply wanted to give us two terrific characters playing two utterly different roles. Baby Doll defines its delightful Betty Boop territory. And Paris reigns over the perfume terrain of powerful, bold, glorious, heady, rosy grandeur.

Chandler Burr | Five Favorite Scents | August 2004

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The Dreamer | Versace

After all those goddamn, tired out, hairy chested, cliché macho, standardized masculine fragrances you find out there, you have to wonder: Who the hell at Versace was the genius who came up with The Dreamer? First, this is so utterly not your father's aftershave that it smells like it fell to earth from the strange, powdery stellar globulous pictured on its box. Like Angel, The Dreamer startles you. Smell Eau Sauvage, and you think, "Oh, men's cologne." (Ho hum.) You smell this thing, and not only do you not think men's cologne (because you can't possibly), you think "My God!..." and then "What the hell is it?!" "It" is, first, absolutely mouthwatering. It is walking through a French pastry shop next to a spice market in southern Thailand. Then there's ice cream, gun powder, fruit candy, hot cocoa, marshmallows, blood orange peel, and probably some DDT. It is the most mesmeric fragrance I know.

www.versace.com

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Coco Mademoiselle | Chanel

I offended a perfumer in Paris by describing Coco Mademoiselle. What I said was that Chanel had clearly decided to create a perfume that American teenage girls would immediately want. His eyebrows arched; "Well, it's a bit more than that," he said. Yes, I agree. It was an entirely forehand compliment: As with Ralph by Ralph Lauren, which was obviously created for the same purpose, Coco Mademoiselle is both an entry level Chanel fragrance and a very smart marketing decision, and there's nothing wrong with either, at all. God knows Nos 19 and 22 can be tough to appreciate immediately. If you like nice scents, you like this perfume, instantly. Period, end of discussion. It is Lovely, flowery, a fresh-faced seventeen-year-old in a summer dress, of excellent quality so the fragrance lasts, and, behind the seeming sweet simplicity, something much more compelling than might at first appear. That something is simply that when you come across someone wearing it, you want to lean closer to them.

www.chanel.com

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Happy for Men | Clinique

A rare example of the marketing and creative people working together, Happy for Men is exactly what it says it is. This is (let's be clear) a feminine fragrance being sold to men, and every man, and lots of women, should own it. Wake up Happy, work Happy, go to the barbeque Happy; a guy who smells like this is sunshine and cool, summer beach and intelligence, snowboarding and sexiness. I'd describe the scent, but nah, track it down and try it. Damn, this stuff is nice!

www.clinique.com

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Lucienne | Lucienne von Doz

Lucienne is one of the most unambiguously "sexed" fragrances I know. It's a feminine. I say this (to underline the point) as someone who doesn't actually believe "masculine" versus "feminine" fragrances. Moreoever this does not mean a man couldn't wear it. He could. And that is crucial about the aesthetics of Lucienne. What would allow him to carry it off is not (and could not be) any sort of effeminacy: There is zero camp value in this fragrance, no irony whatsoever. Now, oddness and camp don't denote cheap; they can be done not only "straightfaced" but in the context of terrific quality (see YSL's Baby Doll), yet Countess Von Doz has played it completely straight, aimed at a classic, deeply serious, early-20th-century work of pure olfactory glamour, a tough act to pull off. The fact that it succeeds says everything about von Doz and the brilliant young perfumeur Laurent Bruyère of IFF who worked under her direction. The three-second eyes-closed free-association sniff recalls inevitably Chanel and Patou. Exalted heights. Lucienne is utterly visible without speaking too loudly and subtle without falling into understatement. It has a distinct personality without, thank God, making an issue of it. And the reason a man could wear it illustrates the confused concept gender occupies in perfumes. We tend to speak of ingredients as gendered. Roses are for women. Woods are for men. But Lucienne, which smells (for the most part) of what the industry calls "feminine" ingredients, also smells of something much more important and more fundamental. Quality. While being unambiguously a feminine, it is just as easily unambiguously a masculine for the reason that it is unambiguously beautiful.

www.lucienneperfumes.com

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Bigarade | Jean-Claude Ellena for Frédéric Malle/ Editions de Parfums
En Passant | Olivia Giacobetti for Frédéric Malle/ Editions de Parfums

I only put these two together because they were both created for Frédéric Malle's uniquely strange and difficult to find perfume outfit, which produces fragrances made like no others, rather expensive, and appallingly good. Malle got an idea in his head, went to individual great perfumers, and offered a deal: Make me a perfume. Your ideal perfume. Put whatever the hell you want in it, the most expensive, fabulous stuff around. Create it exactly as you think it should be. And I'll bottle and sell it. In the little Malle boutique at Barneys, which is the only place in New York City you can smell these things, they make a big deal out of their central metaphor, that these perfumes are written by individual authors given full authorial integrity and simply published by Malle, who may edit a bit here and there but basically just puts out the work. (It's why it's called "Editions de Parfums," which is also the web site: www.editionsdeparfums.com; a "maison d'edition" in French is a publishing house.)

Weird Concept. The result is outrageous. All eleven fragrances in the current lineup range from very good to truly superb; two strike me as outrageously superb, Bigarade and En Passant, though they are utterly different. The best way to describe Jean-Claude Ellena's Bigarade is to say, first, that it is a vast smell. And second, that it smells like a human being in the summer in a complex weather system; whoever this person is, we can smell them, they're showered and clean but it's warm and they have a smell all the same, and the Lovely, complex smells of summer are all around and clinging to their skin, and also it seems to have just rained because there's the scent of rainwater on pavement and perhaps a bit of ozone, plus some flower petals and grass that got washed into the puddle they're stepping in. As for En Passant, Giacobetti has done a perfect lilac, but the scent is so fascinating that what this woman has crafted isn't just a smell; the damn thing transports you with loveliness. I would say that it's magic, but I know it's simply molecules. Still, your retinas shrink from the pure pleasure of this scent.

www.editionsdeparfums.com