Dior Addict is either one of the weirdest traditionalist fragrances ever introduced or one of the most normal of the weirdos. It depends on how you smell it. But be forewarned that Addict is one of those perfumes that constitutes an olfactory Rorschach test: opinions on it vary widely, it never really smells the same to any two people, and if you wear it two days in a row it won’t even necessarily smell the same to you.

Addict was creative-directed by the Dior designer John Galliano and built by the perfumer Thierry Wasser, who was recently snatched up by LVMH’s Francois Demachy and installed as Guerlain’s in-house perfumer. Wasser has now ascended to the ranks of the in-house superelite, which includes Hermès’ Jean-Claude Ellena, Chanel’s Jacques Polge and Christopher Sheldrake, Cartier’s Mathilde Laurent and Jean Patou’s Jean-Michel Duriez. His first official effort at Guerlain, Guerlain Homme, which was unveiled last month, is a nicely serviceable masculine, one that works today but would have worked just as well in the 1960s. Wasser’s Dior Addict, by contrast, was introduced in 2002, would arguably have worked in 1925 as a maximal-minimalist version of Shalimar (take everything out except the ethyl vanillin, pump it full of neon gas and run an electrical current though it) and could conceivably work in 2025. It’s that diaphanous— and that odd.

Yes, Addict is a masterpiece of coumarin (the chewy, taffy-like, vaguely almondy synthetic molecule derived from tonka bean) and vanilla, but what does that get you? To some it reads like a giant, powdery light bulb: warm and formless and slightly alarming. At moments, I have thought of those phenomenally irritating entirely white canvases you see in museums, which force you to conclude that modern art is truly a fraud. At other moments, the thing seems to be generating a wisp of fresh green submerged in sweet vanilla bean, like a scoop of French vanilla ice cream with a tiny green twig snapped in two and accidentally stuck in it. Wasser’s work is technically solid; Addict performs very well on skin, lasting and diffusing like clockwork. Its aesthetics remain the question. But nothing this resolutely indefinable can fail to have value. Stare at this painting and see what you think.