Buildings are scent machines. At 40 Mercer, the Jean Nouvel-designed building going up in SoHo, the kitchens are Italian walnut, the backsplashes are heavy-gauge stainless steel, and the air is pungent with the scent of fresh concrete. Then there’s my old tenement in the East 30’s, fragrant with prewar brick, old plaster and sweet, aging linoleum tile. The scent of building materials can indeed be wonderful, so it’s not surprising that some excellent perfumes evoke them. Comme des Garcons’ fascinating, perverse and basically unwearable Odeur 53 smells like paving tar. Azzaro created Chrome for men, an idea based on chilled steel. Technically, it’s possible to make a perfume that someone would actually want to wear based on the smell you get walking past the fresh steel skeleton of the Bank of America at 42nd Street and the Avenue of the Americas, but frankly, I’ve never smelled one. However, there happen to be three scents on the market that, by happy chance, smell like three different building materials, each as fragrant as jasmine and as innovative as jet fuel.

One of the most beautiful scents is that of concrete. The raw, noisy gush of aroma from the cement mixer’s mouth, or the smell of a freshly poured sidewalk hot with summer and wet with rain, is the perfume of the city, and in Christine Nagel and Jacques Huclier’s B*Men for Thierry Mugler , you can smell a fresh 50-story tower being born. Nagel and Huclier have added an extra layer to this urban fragrance; if B*Men is a creamy cement wall, this wall has a French patisserie on one side (caramelized sugar, crusty bread) and, on the other, the rich spice aisle of Kalustyan’s at Lexington Avenue and 28th Street. It’s a terrific perfume.