I have a friend who is a film editor. When you go to the movies with him, he doesn’t watch the film but its composition. While you’re enjoying the acting, the plot and the dialogue, he will talk to you with a precise passion about a sequence of jump cuts that barely registered with you. He sees things that you don’t. Similarly, perfumers smell things that you don’t. One whiff and they are deconstructing a perfume and staring down its interior architecture.

Terre d’Hermes is one of the scents that perfumers praise most highly. “Technically perfect,” a pro commented to me in Paris last year. This scent, created in 2006 by Jean-Claude Ellena, is not an aesthetic revolution. It is, however, a work of extreme precision, the raw materials mesh like the guts of a Swiss watch. Terre is flawless in the metrics that perfumers pay attention to: diffusion, structure and persistence on skin. And its elegance derives as much from its mechanics as from its actual smell, which is a masculine iteration: burnished spice, old leather, autumn air, cologned citrus, of the luminous perfumery that Ellena is known for. If you are in the industry, you simply marvel at the technical work.