Burberry is licensed to Inter Parfums, and my principal criticism of Inter Parfums-made scents, which include Christian Lacroix, Lanvin, Banana Republic and the Gap, is a general lack of daring. Inter Parfum’s fragrances can be competent or incompetent, commercial misses or right on the commercial pulse, but to me they most often lack, shall we say, gonads. Now comes the feminine version of The Beat. Under the creative direction of Christopher Bailey (Burberry’s creative director) and Philippe Benacin (the chief executive of Inter Parfums), plus the three-perfumer team of Beatrice Piquet, Dominique Ropion and Olivier Polge, they have made something quite competent, quite well-tailored to the Burberry brand, and almost innovative.

The Beat has amassed both a startling amount of attention and a truly devoted following, and it’s not difficult to understand why. It is a nicely avant-garde scent— nicely in the sense that it is smartly and carefully positioned at that pendulum point where the refreshingly different and startling meets the accessibly commercial. To phrase it differently, the Beat manages a bit of edginess without actually being provocative (like the brilliant Gucci Envy), neuronally overwhelming (Angel, Outrageous) or disorientingly strange (most anything by Comme des Garcons). This is both its weakness (at least for those with sophisticated tastes and a desire for a thrill) and its strength. One could argue that given what Burberry doubtlessly wanted, the balance manages to fall on the side of strength.

The avant garde part of the Beat (its best part) descends from a strong aesthetic predecessor, one of the most innovative, authentically strange scents of the past two decades: Dzing!, created by the extremely talented and quixotic perfumer Olivia Giacobetti for l’Artisan Parfumeur. Giacobetti’s concept was the scent of the circus: the woody sawdust, the animalic smell of the tigers, the caramel apples, the heavy, canvas-tent-covered air. If you know the conceptual blueprint, you can make out these elements rather clearly. But the scent critic Luca Turin has noted that Dzing! in fact smells like cardboard (which testifies to how little a perfume’s concept may have to do with the final work of art), and cardboard is a comforting, subtly succulent mix of wood, spice and cream.

And that is part of what you get. The other part is a decent sleek urban (meaning no flowery stuff but rather the smell (literally) of the interior of an Aston Martin: metal, expensive leather and carpeting, glass and cooled air) fashion feminine. The Beat could have really been a statement. Instead, that potential is mostly subsumed by a well-made gourmand contemporary scent: cake batter and sweetish spices, nicely crafted and reminiscent of Calvin Klein’s new Secret Obsession but with less culinary complexity and less texture, i.e., less daring.

The Beat is good. It’s a very nice, British-feeling scent and a good representative of the new Burberry and today’s London cool. Perhaps the only real reproach is that, pushed farther, it might have been much more.