Chandler Burr

I have an intensive search on for a new category of scent that exists in my head and, when I find examples of it in real-life, transfixes me. All the aesthetic schools of this art contain masterpieces—the super-perfumer Calice Becker recently showed me a recreation she's done of a 1980 Dior masculine that had disappeared, "Jules." originally by perfumers Jean Martel. A mid-20th-century machine, deep and grand. But I'm currently really into the 21st-century minimalists. Verveine and Menthe Fraîche for James Heeley are transfixing, alchemies of mint and verbena that hit your brain's pleasure centers like heroin but with the force of a moth's wings on your skin. Hermès' Un Jardin sur le Nil, 'L'Eau d'Hiver for Frédéric Malle. These are scents that, like photons, have astonishing impacts and yet no mass at all.