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Editor's note: This is the second of our exclusive 'deleted scenes' from Chandler Burr's forthcoming book, The Perfect Scent. Chandler has written a brief paragraph explaining the context of the piece at the start, and the extract is rounded off with a brief Q&A.

Details of how you can obtain the book, as well as the chance to discuss this extract can be found at the end.

Like the previous section, we were originally envisioning the book as being about me as the Times critic and only later decided to cut that thread, so this section was out. You’ll notice that I sometimes write things just barreling straight through without stopping to check the spelling of Whoopi or to find an example of “a polyurethane piece of shit like TK__________.” I like TK’s (an editorial mark meaning “information To Come” but written TK because there are relatively few instances of the letters T and K coming together in English so it’s easy to search for).

The brand-new first-ever New York Times scent critic, and so I went on The Today Show—got up early, a hot August day, got a car service up 3rd Ave, then west on 50th [TK 50th?] to Rockefeller Center, into the green room, onto the set, tripping over the electric cables snaking everywhere and cameramen with headsets, and Matt Lauer was the nicest guy, slightly incredulous to be honest ("But how do you describe a smell?") but still game enough (as we're waiting to go on air he's telling me how he doesn't wear scent because in our time we had, what, Drakkar Noir? and what is that stuff? and I replied that he was 110% right, it's unwearable, and then felt guilty because perfumer Pierre Wargnye, who created it—it was revolutionary when it came out, OK?—is one of the nicest guys I've ever met and one of the best communicators on perfume construction around; at the end of the segment Matt shoved his wrist at me and asked what he was wearing and I think I said, "Uh, you?" and he shouted, "Purell!").

I went on Whoopi [TK SPELLING WHOOPIE?] Goldberg's morning radio show (she and her guys get up really early), rode my bike over to 6th and 42nd just after dawn, was supposed to be on air ten minutes and we kept going the whole hour, I'd invited my buddy Mike Strong to watch and he showed up earlier than me, they put him in a booth and Whoopi sees him and motions to him to get his ass into the broadcast room and hang out next to her, we're all going nuts, it's like a party and she turns out to be a complete knowledgeable smell freak with very decided opinions, stuff she hates, and scents she totally loves. (I should stop being so surprised. My friends Alexia and Ethan invite me to their place in Brooklyn for dinner, they're also inviting over her book editor, Panio, and his girlfriend Molly who turns out to be Molly Ringwald, and Molly turns out to be a complete perfume connoisseur and knows—and has worn—virtually every fragrance I've ever smelled, so we talk perfume all night.)

The Washington Post ran something nice, and a Chicago Tribune columnist said, "This guy's job should have been mine," and we couldn't figure out if she meant it nicely or as a dig. (Mostly nicely, she told me later.) Others were much less nice, like the columnist (the column was titled "Smell of Excess") who began tartly, "Those of us who toil in the trenches of journalism often fantasize about that 'dream job.' Restaurant reviewer. Movie critic. Animal columnist. We never knew we were aiming too low until we learned the New York Times has hired a perfume critic. That's right. Let's say it together. Perfume. Critic. In other words, this guy -- who goes by the improbable name of Chandler Burr -- will be paid for smelling ...." Fair enough. The Columbia Journalism Review did an interview with me that was preceded by an intro presenting the idea of a scent critic as equal parts "hey, this is pretty cool" and "is The Times serious?" In response to the piece, one reader wrote, "I collect perfumes as a hobby/obsession, so when I heard from similarly fragrance-fixated friends on makeupalley.com's bulletin board for perfume—" (one of the biggest perfume discussion sites; there are, it turns out, tons of them—basenotes, perfumecritic, scentzilla, nowsmellthis, perfumeoflife, braintrappedingirlsbody, and lots of others, an entire fan world furiously discussing everything from Britney Spears' retail nuclear device on every counter to the details of the most microniche perfumes I've never heard) "—that Mr.Burr would be contributing to the New York Times on a regular basis I was thrilled. His first column wasn't perfect…our tastes in fragrance do not coincide. But.....just the fact that the NYT hired him to do this is great."

This opinion, which was quoted a few places online, was not, to put it mildly, universal. I'm not a web surfer at all, in fact I do everything I can to minimize my life online I'm one of the people least interested in blogs I've ever met, I rarely read them, and I take a SWAT approach to my nytimes.com: Get in fast, survey the landscape, hit your targets, get the hell out. Opinion on the perfume sites was hotly divided on me, on the column, on The Times, my choices. From one site: "I shall ever recall today," said one of me, "when bemused irritation became patent loathing." Which met with "LOL!" and "say it sistah!" and "what an ill-informed ass he is."

"he's pompous as hell, that's for sure, but it seems like criics often are."

"he irritates me. anyone else?"

"He infiltrates perfume boards then drops the communities when he gets bored. Jerk."

"I think he feels it would be inappropriate to post regularly. I have written him and he responds quickly. I think he is a busy person."

"I enjoy reading him even when I don't agree with him.

"I actually like him—I met him and he's nice and enthusiastic."

"the funniest thing is ppl who apparently know absolutely nothing about fragrances feel they could fill in Burr's shoes. thank god it's at least Burr and not any of those."

"Yes. I don't like him, but I don't think just *anyone* could start writing about perfume."

We'd made a very conscious decision that The Times column would cover perfumes from every era—Jicky, which started modern perfumery, was 1898—and one wrote, "I was dissapointed that he didn't cover any fragrances that came out in 2006. Old news, yawn." We were absolutely clear that I'd be free to give my (considered) opinions the way I felt them, and they hated something, which I'd written elsewhere, about Diorella. "it's not a bad thing that perfume criticism is actually starting to get attention," wrote someone. "Maybe people will start to think more about the fruity-floral world domination that seems to be going on via dept. stores. And he loves the vintage Diors. If only for that, I'd be glad he's got this job. I *want* to see them released to a wider audience and perhaps (a girl can dream) this will inspire Dior to do so." But then I'd gone and described Diorella: to me the best analogs for smelling this astonishing perfume are (and I realize this sounds strange, but in my olfactory experience these are the two real-world references) a freshly dry-cleaned fur coat (the clean, strange thickness you get when you smell fur coupled with the bracing, effervescent trace of the dry cleaning chemicals) and a very fine, chalky mint toothpaste (a complex, indirect mint with the dull brilliance of burnished platinum, a metal whose low-wattage glow is actually so expensive). The response: "Burr finds mint—basil is not mint. is mint one of the principle 'green notes'? i'm thinking unlikely. but in any case, with the plethora of other notes, he picks MINT as the main note?" The response to that: "about Diorella - I've seen someone I very much like on this board say that Prada is *identical* to Angel, so much so that Thierry Mugler—" (creator of Angel) "—could sue Dior. I don't get that at all. But she does and I respect her opinion even if I disagree w/ it." The categoric response to that: "talking about mint in Diorella and not mentioning basil is like talking about Diorissimo and never mentioning lily of the valley: a mortal—not just a venial—sin.")

Someone said, "I don't understand why some folks are getting all huffy. Are not we ALL fragrance critics here?....Give a guy a break!" and the response was, "Yes, that is EXACTLY OUR POINT. He's claiming to be the First Perfume Critic, the Columbus of perfume writing..." (Actually the press release said "The New York Times announced today…its first columnist to review and rate fragrances," but the word "first" just killed the online people.)

What strikes me about the heat of the disdain, the viciousness—the flame wars over which jasmine feminine is the best, or whether someone is a bitch because she likes En Passant better than l’Air de Rien and doesn't she know it's shit— is the degree of the fury aroused. These are bottles of perfume.

I can't exaggerate how unexpected this job was to me. I interned in downtown Tokyo at the giant trading company Mitsui Bussan (a huge aluminum and glass rectangle, our floor overlooked the oxidized [TK SPELLING]-nickel green roofs of the emperor's palace) in the kenkyo-bu [TK SPELLING]. My bucho took me for barbequed eel in the salariman lunch places under Omotesando. I was tracking a career in international trade, or perhaps foreign affairs. This is compounded by the fact that aside from a pair of Timberland boots, I've never bought a single thing from any designer or brand, and it holds no interest for me. I would no more purchase a $400 Gucci shirt than I would a Maserati. And at least I admire the hell out of the Maserati. Added to that is the fact that I've always looked at fashion as happening on someone else's planet. I can't imagine actually wearing a belt with a huge Hermès "H" on the buckle. And then this happened. I talked to a friend about my ambivalence. He sent me a piece by Ginia Bellafante, who from 1999 to 2004 did for The Times on fashion what I now do on perfume—both reporter and critic. Bellafante said that when she started the beat, her mother considered disowning her.

The piece was a nice delineation not only of Bellafante's thoroughly-mixed feelings but of the otherworldliness of the whole thing. It wasn't merely the superficially silly, though there is much of that. "The fashion beat affords…plenty of time spent in the company of fashion people, something variously dreadful and exhilarating. Disciples of the fashion tribe will surely say The Devil Wears Prada exaggerates their manners and proclivities. It doesn't." She reported a conversation with a PR girl who had confided that her client's collection was going to be "devastational." But then the marketing materials for virtually every perfume amount to intellectual carpet bombing.

They fuel the beast with fake stories. Guerlain sends out press materials about its great Jicky of 1889 that tell the public, "When perfumer Aimé Guerlain returned to France after finishing his studies in England, he left behind a young Englishwoman with whom he was madly in love. Despite the heartache, life went on … Years later, in 1889, he created Jicky, in a tribute to the love of his youth." This is the marketing story. Guerlain pushes it hard. The reality is, apparently, that Guerlain made Jicky for his nephew, Jacques, nickname Jicky, but it doesn't play as well as some great fictional love story. I don't think the executives at Guerlain need to spin fake stories. They bore the hell out of me, but the marketing people tell me they sell well.

They spin this tedious candy for you over and over. When Lauder introduced Beautiful, the story that Lauder PR people and Leonard Lauder himself told reporters was that Estee had come up with the name. She'd tested it on friends, and all of them said "Oh, that's beautiful." Nice story. A few months later, Lauder admitted the name had been chosen by a Clinique exec. On it's own, it's inconsequential. When, however, you have them on the phone, and you're asking them questions, and they're simply lying to you, when they expect you to re-vomit up their marketing protocols in print (and they have good reason for automatically assuming you will; most of the publications that write on perfume do) and you're completely aware that what they're insisting is "so-and-so designer's vision" is the manufactured result of some 3:30pm corporate meeting in an office tower in midtown, when you ask the simplest question about the molecules forming the real construction of the scent and they behave like panicked sheep and the stuttering and/or dreary silence you hear coming over the phone represents not necessarily them but the fanatic neuroticism of some huge company that doesn't believe in its products, doesn't believe in its clients, and sure as hell doesn't believe in accurate journalism—then you get angry. Those few moments in which they actually let down the armor and talk to you like a human being pulls you back from the edge. Late in the day—it was winter, the Manhattan skyline outside his office was gray and getting darker, and there were no leaves on the trees in the park far below us—a top perfume exec finally stopped talking. He'd been dutifully giving me the made-up line on his latest scent. I think he looked at my face during the recitation. He rubbed his eyes hard with his hands and looked at me. "Don't you think sometimes that I have out of body experiences talking about this crap?" he asked.

No, actually. I didn't think that. But it reassures me.

Part of the problem is that perfume is sold within the world of fashion, and fashion can be mesmerizing in the way that porn can be mesmerizing. It can be important as a reflection of, say, cultural change,, but relative to education policy and economic trends, the importance of the trend that decrees that handbags will be squared this year is an order of magnitude lower. Because it is ultimately so empty and because it is fed by facile vanity, the pretension that accrues under its wheels is more voluminous. Usually the silliness cruises the stratospheric. Sometimes it becomes untethered and spins off into the outer vacuum of complete irreality. When Martin Marghiella TK SPELLING makes a second-rate career of ostentatiously avoiding being photographed, he is a man desperately screaming for attention, but at least we're spared having to see him; when fashion photographer Hans Feurer tells a reporter, ''I'm such a private person I don't even give my cellphone number to my family," he's just an asshole.
The spelling and grammatical errors that litter their inane, intentionally false, touchingly earnest press releases. Alexander McQueen's Kingdom— the press release for was printed in immaculate charcoal on heavy bond paper. Under "The Concept" was a quote, italicized and capitalized: "OUR HEART IS OUR KINGDOM. IF WE DO NOT ALLOW OUR HEARTS TO BE BROKEN, THEN WE ARE NOT EXPERIENCING LIFE TO THE FULL." -ALEXANDER MCQUEEN. This is completely stupid.

You open the press brochure, which has at great cost been printed in a bronzed metallic laminate like they used to make in the disco era (the French are to a great degree stuck in an idea of luxury appropriate to 1977). You open it. "Him—and no one else." You think: Oh boy. Next page. The pull-out quote: "My eyes are riveted on you, like a magnet." Note in particular the comma ("My eyes are riveted on you comma like a magnet") as if the magnet were so powerful it formed its own independent clause. "I cannot take them off you."

And now let's read the text. "You are there. I can see you at the bend of the road. Everything around you has disappeared—the city, the buildings, the streets and the crowds seem to have vanished. Your presence has absorbed it all. Your attitude fascinates me. Physical, sensitive, strong and sensual. The clothes you re wearing make your every move unforgettable. I recognize the signature instantly. The style is inimitable. Who are you? A man. An Yves Saint Laurent man. That's all I know about you."

Egad.

The next pull quote, "I will call you 'L'Homme Yves Saint Laurent'" and below this philogenetic musing we get, "Sure of himself and his masculinity, 'L'Homme Yves Saint Laurent' asserts his style. His elegance and refinement underscore his virility." Fascinating. "His presence is charismatic… physical." (The ellipse is a nice touch.) "His seductive magnetism—combining strength and sensitivity—makes him totally irresistible." It's like reading porn from The Discovery Channel. This is, incidentally, the press kit for TK______, which after all the froth is just the 3,987th version of the same old masculine cliché. The press kits aren't just fill in the blank, they're fill in the blank + seduction-as-harangue.

Gucci sent me, "A sensual, floral fragrance, Gucci Envy me 2 is as undeniably feminine and intoxicating as the woman who wears it. An expression of feminine impulse, Gucci Envy Me 2 [note the switch to the capital M in this case] an irresistible object of desire. In Limited Edition, it is precious, rare and only for a select few. This is the essence of a woman who relishes temptation almost as much as finally giving in to it. She is driven, impossible audacious and sweetly sensual, delighting in life's most delicious pleasures…." It is, of course, as un-rare as the international corporate distribution network can possibly make it, a product for a select few million. I look at the end of the press release and see it's by a girl I work with. She is really nice girl, eager, and sincere. And…oh, kill me now.

I actually tell them all the time not to send me the fucking press kits for A, ecological reasons (I can't recycle four tons of paper), B, they cost the houses a ton, thick, luscious high-rag-content paper—let them put the money into the juice, C, they're not only content free but, D, they depress the hell out of me. "It's got notes of choc-o-late!" they trill to you, "and candy-yummy-gooey goodness! and addictive notes of fill-in-whatever." Addictive? Their accountants wish. They'd happily put oxycontin in the stuff if it nailed that second sale, but they can't and it doesn't so let's drop the pretense and that particular adjective.

They "quote" the designer. "Deeply provocative, a man's scent embraces and seduces you whenever he draws you close." Oh for Christ's sake.

In my capacity as a New York Times reporter, in my mind I divide everything I do into "real" and "PR." The PR is necessary. Basically I hate it, I'm completely cynical about it, and I recognize that it's part of the game. The game is the presentation of huge amounts of product worth billions of dollars in the pages of magazines and newspapers. The Times is not immune to its base mechanics. The Times fashion sections are acolytes of the new, cultists and cultivators of the trend, arbiters of the hip for the simple reason that this is the substance of fashion, and, as much as the church-state separation is both given lip service for public consumption and simultaneously sincerely, fervently believed in— quiet watchers of advertising dollars, just like everyone else. I'm glad the RNC and DNC don't put full-page ads in the Times every week. That would be a lot of money for everyone in political reporting to ignore. Everyone knows how weird it already is to have Chevron, Walmart, and General Motors spending millions a year on the ad space of a paper whose job is to stalk and attack gross strategic corporate mismanagement, the export of American manufacturing jobs to less-expensive labor markets like China's, and the international petroleum industry's environmental depredations, systematic corruption, funding of terrorism, and warping of American foreign policy. It's like a company hiring a PR agency to get the word out, and the agency also employs a team of private investigators dedicated to bringing down the company, that team being funded by the fees the company pays to get the word out. It's a strange, strange relationship. The fact that it works is testament to a beautiful secular religion involving a civic belief in free speech, the undeniable fact that the thing shows up in TK CIRCULATION___ million pairs of hands and TK____ million computer screens every day, and some other pieces of magic no one wants to look at too closely right now for fear that the whole thing will fall apart.

The writers and editors on the Times' fashion pages swim in a sea of informational crap. The PR machines with multi-million dollar contracts from Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, Giorgio Armani, and LVMH produce mountains of gleaming brochures, slick CDs, glossy photos, and ingenious wrappings for the above, packed with images of bottles upon bottles after bottles on top of bottles of perfume. (And skirts and shoes and bags and bracelets, but I only see the perfume stuff.) And everything "For Immediate Release" is, 100% of the time, nothing. Just nothing.

The house's are simply completely unused to handing out anything except the most facile, superficial, laughably vapid bullshit. Why does it matter? It debases good perfume. My first year at The Times, Paco Rabanne sent me the PR materials for the launch of their new masculine, Black XS. The text centered around the model—the skinny, empty kid whose face they were using to represent the perfume, and it was embarrassingly stupid, pathetically grasping. The part about the gaze is particularly insane.

"Only a man combining masculinity and appeal could represent Black XS. A sought-after face scattered over men's magazine covers, Will Chalker stands out for his performance at high-profile fashion shows, flaunting muscle and making good use of an irresistible gaze. He was the obvious choice for the Black XS ambassador. Here, we see muscles in relief and a torso covered with chains… there, we see him nestled amid the sheets with a rose between his teeth. The man, free of prejudice, yields to the camera lens of photographer Matthew Brookes in a very natural way."

There's no point in criticizing the idiocy of the PR for a polyurethane piece of shit like TK__________. The standard fatuous marketing verbiage, revomited for the nth time from some infinite cesspool that sits beneath the communal press management machine. (The bizarre "free of prejudice" thing is just a direct translation from a French phrase which sounds moronic in English, one that no one thought to trim out. This is ubiquitous in fashion; the French are linguistically incapable of picking them up, and the Americans are too baffled, or cowed, or indifferent, to stamp them out.) They whip up the usual fatuous, pointless list of "notes" (the Orwellian marketing term)—Calabrian Lemon, Black Cardamon, Patchouli, and Praline. These lists are for morons. Three of the four materials named here might actually be in this juice, though I wouldn't bet any money on it. As for the fourth, because the houses have followed a self-destructive policy of intentionally keeping consumers in the dark on how perfume is actually made, there are in fact people who think—to the degree to which consumers are permitted to think about perfume—that Paco Rabanne is somehow dumping caramel-covered pecans (which is what praline is) into a vat of hexane to distill them. They aren't. It is the garbage the marketing people send out on silver trays, and it makes perfumers privately groan in agony, but they've been told in no uncertain terms to shut the hell up and that they'll keep their heads down over their lab benches if they know what's good for them. What the marketers don't send out are all the surprising natural materials that are, in fact, in the juices ("La carrote?…"). What they don't send out are all the interesting synthetic materials that are in the juices. Their argument is always the same: "The consumer won't understand." No. The consumer would prefer to be fed predigested elephant shit.

What take this from insignificance to minor tragedy is that Black XS is a terrific scent, one of the best in a long time—moreover it is, quite astonishingly, made for men—an honest-to-god serious, beautifully structured machine built by Olivier Cresp. Cresp says the idea was electrical current, which sounds suspiciously like words some marketer whispered in his ear, then pushed him toward a microphone to repeat, but forget them. What he and Puig produced is something beautifully different, unplaceable, and instantly mesmerizing, as if an experimental rock album were both authentically innovative and yet compulsively listenable. The smell itself could be described as swimming in a sweet-water pool inside a blossoming lemon grove. It is so blissfully free of any trace of moronic hairy-chested machismo, formulaic sports car attitude, and urban-slick insecurity that the result would be shocking if the scent didn't embrace you with such calm assurance. Any of this they could talk about. What do they talk about? An unremarkable kid with no relation to the creation of this scent in any way shape or form, his performance at high-profile fashion shows, his flaunting his muscle and making use of an irresistible gaze. Free of prejudice.

What has been truly devastational to perfume is the perfume industry. I am as capitalist as Mike Bloomberg, but the short-sightedness in this business would numb Veblen. Bellafonte identified The Devil Wears Prada, a movie I went to see because it came out the same time that we launched the scent critic column, as the first film that saw fashion for what is has become, "not visionaries but functionaries" who live and dress and think according to the seasonal edicts of global conglomerates "with little appreciation for whimsy." Or art qua art, to put a finer point on it. Because perfume is a forcibly subjugated province of fashion, I spend a certain amount of time talking to fashion people. Bellafonte: "A fashion editor might not genuinely crave the new pump of the hour, but she worries how devalued she'll be if she doesn't get it." In this new Orwellian world in which originality and substance are capital offenses, I find this observation—"[F]ashion people don't possess artistic souls but actuarial ones, [and] they are energized more by fear than by desire"—lamentably true. And when you smell the fear in the perfumes, that's when you start taking away stars. That's the serious aspect. There is also the non-serious aspect: These are people who actually have mental episodes over the placement of their seats at fashion shows. I was in one of my deepest periods of ambivalence in mid-August when I got a call from a girl.

"Mr. Burr?"

Yep?

She was calling from The Fashion Week Daily, the (she explained) IMG publication "distributed in the tents." (I said: What are "the tents"? The girl paused on the phone, apparently baffled. "The tents. The tents, in Bryant Park, where the shows take place…" Was I nuts? No, I'd just never heard of Fashion Week, which happens every September in New York, and had never been to a "show." She said, "Oh," then, a true professional, gave me a pass. So, she was calling to ask if I'd do this "series of Q&A's from various fashion experts." (Oh. So I'm now a fashion expert. Awesome.)
"We'll just you the questions by email, is that OK?" Sure. "It has to be all about fashion, OK?" OK. They sent them over, I appended answers.

- "Mr. Burr: Which perfumes do you think are probably the most popular among the fashion crowd and why?"

I know that fashionistas claim to like Comme des Garcons' Odeur 53, but I've never actually smelled it on anyone, and I don't actually believe anyone can wear it without bursting into blue flame. In fact, I don't actually think these people know what the hell Odeur 53 smells like. This perfume is like the Yeti: Many claim to have worn it, but it's always "Well, last year" or "When I was yak farming in Calabria." Right.

- "When too many fashion folk come together, all wearing different scents, is there a probability of sensory overload?"

There is a probability of room-temperature nuclear fusion, but sensory overload? Not olfactorily. Fashion people (for some reason that correlates negatively with the wearing of hideous leather slacks) tend to under-spray. Not over, like your aging blue-hairs on East 82nd. They might wear, it's true, perfumes whose aesthetics are less Proust and more Hustler. Or Inches. These are tough to dose low. But fashionistas tend to be mysteriously light on the trigger.

- "How many spritzes is too many when you're seated in close quarters?"

Depends. Issey Miyake's Le Feu? I love this stuff like Richard Pryor loved crack, but you could jump-start Soweto with .001 ml of Le Feu injected into a butt cheek. Diorella? You might want to stop at four, but for goddsake make it a good four, on the neck and (most important) forearms, and wear a strapless top. Pamplemousse by Parfums des Beaux Arts? It's so subtle and lovely and fresh you could go seven or eight and have people clubbing each other's assistants to score the seat next to yours. Happy for Men? I was once with a 6'3" blond Canadian with a lumberjack's build and a neck bathed in this stuff, and you just couldn't get too close or stay too long; Happy for Men is basically methamphetamine with none of the disadvantages.

- "What are the elements that make a scent chic?"

A brand whose creative team is willing to give the poor perfumer a price-per-pound for compound higher than the cost of a can of tuna and a Snickers. Start there.

- "Most every clothing label has a scent: Why do fashion and fragrance go together so well?"

Are you kidding? Because if you can create a blockbuster perfume, that thing will print you money faster than the Bush administration can burn it. Yes, yes, some designers are either skilled or lucky enough to get scents that really do, for better or worse, perfectly re-create olfactorily the aesthetic of their clothing, which is to say the perfect accessory, and if you're dressed by Badgley Mischka and you aren't scented by Badgley Mischka, you might as well wear a wife beater and a jockstrap. That's one reason. But the primary reason, of course, is money. So what if the industry is edging toward a 99/1 flop-to-hit ratio and I just smelled a launch as cheesy as a mustache. You taste that success once, you're so hooked it's like Vegas without the sunburn, baby, you just are not gonna stop rolling those dice because if the dice ever pop up screaming "J'adore!" in your face you'll be polishing your Jimmy Choos with twenty-dollar bills and a dollop of La Mer.

- "Could you love a perfume that was in an ugly package?"

Yes. I would focus on its personality.

I thought they'd send it back. It turned out they loved it.
When the second column ran, I got a call from a friend telling me he'd been listening to Rush Limbaugh on air attacking The Times with "They've got a perfume columnist!" He said someone on the perfume blogs had said well what the hell did Limbaugh know about perfume, and someone else said, yeah, like what did he wear, Eau de Loudmouth or something? and the first person replied, No: Dior Addict. That I liked. At the same time, I'm quite susceptible to the accusation. I spent years reporting on epidemiology and international economics, and feel completely this particular journalistic tension. I realize this is my personal psychology. I spent my undergraduate years in political studies focusing, at schools in Beijing and Paris on politics, history, and international relations, I have a masters degree in international economics and Japanese political studies, and I began my journalism career writing on politics and economic development in Southeast Asia. And I'm writing on perfume in the fashion pages. It freaks me out.

In the end, there are two points. The first is purely logistical, my point of view as a reporter. There is—thank Christ—a substantial buffer between fashion and perfume. Perfume isn't, in fact, fashion. It's a completely separate world, one that for marketing reasons has wound up being created and sold as fashion by raw materials companies that have, in fact, nothing to do with dresses, shoes, or squared bags. When you meet them on the job, in their offices, their labs, at launches, at lunch, most perfume industry people are not doing the intellectual equivalent of stuffing a sock in their jeans. They're working, like the rest of the corporate world, and their best products strike me as being roughly on a par with the best designs and goods it's possible to find. A few are among the worst people I've ever met. Some are stupid. Some a merely victims of their own institutional terror. One I think should be in a mental institution, an opinion shared by those who work for him, but of course that's par for the course in any business. The fact is that I like most of them and some I think are absolutely terrific, delightful, intelligent people, people with whom you spend a very pleasurable afternoon as the traffic flows below, talking new launches and classics, briefs and upcoming materials. They generate a creative element with at least the artistic value of architecture, and this is the second, conceptual point.

What is this stuff? In an parallel world, perfumes would be created by artists, and there would be a Rodin, a Barber, and a Sargent working in the medium of scent as artists work in stone, sound, and paint, its classical forms exhibited at the Metropolitan and sold in bottles at the Guggenheim and the Getty museums as works of olfactory art—you'd be able to take home MOMA's three scents from its giftshop not to put on your wall put into your air; if MOMA were smart, this is exactly what it would do, it would hire a director of scent art, and they'd start identifying and curating the olfactory Klees and Rothkos, and it wouldn't do it tongue in cheek but as art altogether as serious as Klee and Rothko.

Perfumes aren't sold in museums. Yet. But the art, the creativity and beauty that you get to see every once in a while, stuff that just makes you float like Rose Barbare or feel like you're drowning in sunlight like Ambra di Venezia, is underneath. And then I'm thrilled. Thrilled. And after they show you this stuff, after you've smelled it with them, and you see how proud they are of it, you think, OK, this is real. I close my 2.3 pound Dell Latitude X200, and I get on my bike and head down Park (if I've been at Firmenich or Symrise) or across West 57th (if I was at Givaudan or IFF) or 5th (from Fragrance Resources, next to Bergdorfs), and if it's dinner time I'll stop on my way home at Le Kwan Yu at Lex and 39th and while I'm waiting for my takeout I'll get out my cell phone and call my friend Joe in Houston or Mike on West 91st and say, "I just got some great shit! Dolce & Gabbana's Light Blue has this molecule…!"

Then it's real. And then I love this stuff.

Q&A with Chandler

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• Discuss this extract at the Basenotes Community
• 'The Perfect Scent: Inside the Perfume Industry in Paris and New York' will be available from 22 January 2008. Published by Henry Holt. Click here to pre-order from Amazon.com

About the author

As well as being the New York Times first perfume critic, Chandler Burr is also the author of two fragrance books - The Emperor of Scent, and The Perfect Scent.

All articles by Chandler Burr

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