The idea of a high-end collection of exquisite perfumes is now thoroughly done. Hermès can make a plausible case for having started it with the Hermèssences, for which its perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena revolutionized minimalism and linearity into a new, purified luxury. Chanel’s Exclusifs came along three years later and enriched the approach, as did Tom Ford’s Private Blend three months after that. All are excellent.

Armani’s high-end collection, Privé, was actually launched the same year as its Hermès analogue, and the original four offerings were nicely done, if slightly less breathtaking. The only (minor) mistake of Ambré Soie and its confrères was, in a nod to someone’s insecurity (probably the client’s), a small overlay of the scent of standard luxury, which just smells of money (the olfactory cues are obvious: “rich,” “thick,” “heavy”) and that’s not pleasant. (Also, the perfumes’ names are in French, incoherently enough; when will Italian houses allow themselves the superior, non-pretentious choice of Italian?) Still, they were good, serious efforts, intelligently offered as unisex (none of the truly good collections are gendered), and they’ve only been getting better. The latest are Rose Alexandrie, an excellent piece of rose modernism, the nicely executed Oranger Alhambra and Vetiver Babylone.

Working under the creative direction of Giorgio Armani, with Karine Lebret and David Suffitt on his development team, the perfumer Alberto Morillas has created a marvelously accessible vetiver scent. An Indian grass (the name comes from Tamil) now grown in tropical climates from Haiti to Java, vetiver smells somewhere between fresh pine and lemongrass; it is closely related to the latter. Morillas has avoided vetiver’s rawly earthy, humid, terpenic (think of turpentine) aspects. Instead he has given us an astringent jewel, as natural, fresh, and contemporary as the scent of a breeze filtered through the leaves of eucalyptus trees on the California coast.

Vetiver Babylone is Armani in its cool isolation. But Morillas has transcended the brand’s genre, pulling Privé above the usual relentless Armani mass commercialism and producing something anyone would be proud to put in their collection. The scent’s design cues are all (and this is a statement as categoric as the aesthetic debt is obvious) descended directly from Jean-Claude Ellena. The linearity, the transparent structuralism of the materials that lie smoothly atop each other like gold bars, the minimalist luminosity that feels like sunlight through sheets of tempered glass. The exciting hint of synthetic fresh. There’s nothing wrong whatsoever with borrowing a style when the style is great; the Infiniti designers copied those sleek arcs laid down by the Jaguar designers and wound up outdoing their teachers, and what Morillas has crafted here smells like something that Infiniti, were it to dare, might use as its scent logo. The next generation of “the car smell,” the odor of a luxury sports car of the future.

There are quibbles. The juice’s stability and persistence are not quite engineered to Japanese standards. It eschews daring and innovation in favor of a slightly wider appeal. But in all the basic gears, it drives like a dream. No trace of insecurity. No nod to heavy olfactory tropes of “luxury.” Vetiver Babylone hovers over skin. It radiates quiet, pure as light.