The disappointments among scents marketed to men are greater than the number of atoms in the universe. Masculines (the industry term) are generally defined by the vast creativity, beauty, elegance and innovation that have NOT been put into them. Those qualities are usually reserved for feminines, though men who know scent just wear what’s great and ignore the gender distinctions. Marketers be damned.

How to get out of this mess? Add beauty, daring, and money. Take Tom Ford’s Extreme . The perfumer Pierre Negrin, working under Ford’s creative direction, has created a striking urban scent: the smell of summer asphalt cooling on a tribeca street, black sky overhead, expensive leather shoes. (I bet it’s loaded with birch tar and guaic wood). Extreme is not my favourite. No matter. You smell the quality of the raw materials here. You smell an interested vision, a mind at work: solitary, powerful, dangerous and very dark.