making SCENTS

Why do you love the fragrance you do? Our columnist Faye Penn sniffed around to find out what makes one person fall for a scent and another turn up her nose

Close your eyes and try to conjure the sweet essence of heliotrope or an earthy violet hint of orris wafting through the air.

Nada, right?

If you've ever tried to describe a perfume, you may have been at a loss--the ingredients that get distilled into fragrances are some of the most elusive sensory stimuli to both imagine and convey to others.

That's partly why parfumeurs often resort to elaborate back stories to sell their fragrances. Consider the promotional text accompanying three fall launches.

There's YSL's woody, floral Parisienne, a new fragrance whose bottle has "vibrating facets evoking Paris, city of light, city of lust, the labyrinth of streets in which you can lose yourself."

Then there's Marc Jacobs's spice-infused Lola, whose muse is "sexy, with a fun, flirtatious wink. Coquettish and a bit provocative ... Playfully alluring and irresistibly tempting."

And what about My Glow, the baby-soft new whiff from Jennifer Lopez, for whom "now is the most perfect moment in her life. Poised between pride in the past and promise for the future, she feels fulfilled as never before. Her spirit is soothed with serenity, her heart overflowing with tenderness. There is no deeper love, no greater happiness than this. No words can describe it, but a fragrance can capture it."

But does it? For help in finding out whether the new fragrances live up to their marketing, we decided to ask a panel of experts: 10 men in a Manhattan bar at happy hour. They like to talk, they always have opinions, and when it comes to the way women smell, guys deserve at least a vote. We didn't bother asking subjects to identify a base of cashmeran wood or top notes of peony. Our question was much simpler: What kind of woman do you envision wearing this fragrance?

What the Men Say

With YSL's Parisienne, Paris wasn't quite what came to mind for José. "It's 2 A.M. at the Gansevoort Hotel, Miami Beach; miniskirt; summer," he imagined. For Julien, Parisienne conjured "a Midwestern blonde with a great body but a reserved personality." But Mitch's imaginary YSL girl wasn't reserved at all. "She's exotic--a dancer," he surmised.

With next to no consensus, we moved on to Marc Jacobs's fragrance, Lola. "She's very conservative," theorized Richard. "She's a cougar," countered Todd. Said Julien: "She's wearing a phenomenal dress, and her perfume makes me want to bury my face in her neck and inhale."

And so it went with My Glow, which did evoke childhood memories for one tester ("I see my little brother coming out of the lilac bush as a kid in Fowlerville, Mich."), but it made another subject think of a corporate shark: "This is for a powerful executive," he said. "She's well-dressed, emotionally unavailable, and ferocious."

At this point we wondered if some female testers--patrons at the same bar--might be more closely aligned in their scent-inspired visions. They weren't: My Glow, said Hillary, "is a young girl's first fragrance." Her friend Barbara disagreed: "It's for a housewife in her 40s involved in charity on a daily basis."

Scents and Sensibility

It's no surprise that people like all kinds of aromas--you need only step into a crowded elevator in the morning to figure that out--but why do we all come away with such different takes on the same whiff?

I consulted Avery Gilbert, author of What the Nose Knows and one of our leading smell scientists (yes, that is what they're called).

Gilbert says that one explainer of scent response is the cumulative result of your many emotional associations: your annoying high school prom date's Brut aftershave, your beloved grandma's White Shoulders, and so forth.

An even more reliable predictor of how you process smells may be Grandma's genes--specifically, the ones she has passed on to you. Every person, Gilbert explains, has 350 fragrance receptors in her nose, designed to pick up odor molecules like a glove catches a baseball. But everyone's are wired differently. So one person who has a weak receptor for the sweetly exotic ylang-ylang might not detect it at all, while another will get clobbered by it.

Gilbert says that researchers are just starting to line up which scents go with which receptors, and once they do, the possibility of creating a GPS to your individual odor preferences has huge consequences for both perfume lovers and makers alike. At the cosmetics counter of the future, he says, "you will lick an electronic lollipop, wait three minutes, and the machine will be able to suggest a whole set of fragrances you're apt to like."

Fascinating stuff, but how does that help with deciding between our fall launches? The best advice even a top smell scientist can give is simple: Try them yourself. "When you smell something you love, it's like finding a haircut you're very happy with or a great jacket," Gilbert says. "You just feel right in it." In other words, the right fragrance might just be beyond words.