Certain perfumes emerge from their bottles like movie stars, pure liquid glamour. What differ are the kind of glamour and the kind of star. The modern paradigm of olfactory glamour is Fragile by Jean Paul Gaultier, a scent like an instantly recognized face passing through a gauntlet of flashbulbs. You glimpse the sleek black dress, and then she’s gone. Chanel No. 19, by contrast, is rather a stunning ingenue; Estee Lauder’s Youth Dew Amber Nude is glamour morphed into sensuality. Juicy Couture’s eponymous first scent is a surprisingly restrained glamour— a starlet wearing pink flowers in the cool Los Angeles air. Roberto Cavalli’s Serpentine is a star in the tropical heat of Rio, where she’s gone for a face lift. Following are three of the more interesting ways glamour is turned into fragrance.

In Love Again is a star from a 1959 Technicolor film. Here is a perfume of saturated color, hot magentas and yellows and cool cyans bleeding onto celluloid. The juice is backlit— carbon arcs of klieg lights, powered with the scent of the gaffer’s white-hot tungsten-halogen filaments. It surpasses reality like the best movie magic does, its hyperrealism making it a kind of gorgeous olfactory pornography. To a degree, the expertise of the perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena, who created this for Yves Saint Laurent, assuages the guilt: one marvels at its expert construction even as it floods the mental eye.