The problem comes when the marketers are really good. Basically because before I smell the perfumes, before the molecules have triggered in my head, turned over old memories and slipped into new olfactory grooves, I’ve had to pass via the marketers to get the scents under my nose. The marketers don’t know scent, it’s not their thing, as they’ve said to me, they’re visual guys, but they control the approach, where you’re captive to your sense of sight, simply because you have to see the damn bottles of Dior or YSL to get them into your hand. The designers are using colors so startling, so mesmerizingly neon (cf: “Ralph Hot”-that box fascinates me, as if it were a tiny entrance to a 3am nightclub in Shinjuku) that with nothing more than a glance they throw up before your eyes a retinal image of the scent. Though scent is invisible. It has no retinal image. It has no seeable identity.

And I don’t want a retinal image of a perfume. I don’t want a visual understanding. That’s not my job, it’s not, at all, what I critique. I want an olfactory understanding. They’re two completely separate neural pathways, two different human senses. I want-and as a critic I need-to smell the juices as free of prejudice as possible. But I open the “Ralph Hot” box, and bottle designer Lara Modjeski leaps at me, she gets to me first via the eyes, she and her marketing team molding what I think I think of the scent, filling in exposition, backstory, dialogue with a single look. You peel away the neon colors, spray the perfume on your arm. Only then is perfumer Pierre Negrin able to get his juice to my nose. Only then can I smell the scent, the thing I’m supposed to focus on exclusively.

The better the marketers, the more ably they guide me into their visions. I do my best to take Pierre’s work at face value, to put Lara’s bottle aside and evaluate what Pierre is doing here. And I hope I’m pretty good at it. But Lara’s already got her shot in.

I have these visions of blindfolding myself and walking into Bloomingdales with a pen and a notebook, but frankly the physical design people are getting so good that even if you felt your way via the bottles to the perfumes, your sense of touch would already be molding your perception of the scents they contain. Annick Goutal’s fluted bottles feel like things found in a drawer belonging to Marie Antoinette, the sanded cool glass monolith of Dolce & Gabbana’s “Light Blue” feels like a man-made undersea stone, the tall organically arcing cylinder of “Flower by Kenzo” is like a tree in another planet’s polymer forest. You feel what the marketers want you to smell.

Optimally I would judge these scents from lab bottles labeled only with codes my assistant controls. She and I would line the bottles up in my office, dip the blotters, take a few minutes to inhale, to process them, without allowing the slightest reaction onto our faces. Then: “What do you think?” Which is what we do now, except that when I smell Bulgari’s “Jasmin Noir,” I’ve got Thierry de Baschmakoff’s lapidary curved black glass bottle before me, as striking as a tiny Richard Serra, or the ingeniously designed, massively heavy bottle of Paul McLaughin providing the perfect opening for Claude Dir’s equally ingenious “Dirty English,” the Juicy Couture masculine.

Would I love “Dirty English” as much without McLaughlin’s frame around it? I’d like to think so. When over three years ago we started the “Scent Notes” column at The New York Times, both my editors and I agreed at that time that it would be better to receive all the perfumes as anonymous, numbered lab samples. It turned out to be completely impracticable. They scent makers, IFF, Givaudan, Symrise, Takasago, Firmenich, and so on, of course make lab samples, but for internal use; there’s no system for getting them to the various brands’ PR people, who in any case would rather slit their wrists than hand their new olfactory launches over to a journalist unsurrounded by the armor of visual baubles and marketing cues, this skein of camouflage that they hope will predispose us to like the product. Many, of course, do take the wrapping for the substance.

Nor is there any protocol for the scent makers to feed lab samples directly to the press. The brands would have hysterics. So they messenger over the scents encased in the bottles wrapped in the packaging. I don�t accept physical press materials any more; they�re an ecological disaster. I only take electronic press materials. I strip away all the pdf’s and images, file the rest of the stuff in Word folders, and then don’t, I must admit, ever read it.) I try to avoid looking at all the cues. Shannon unwraps everything, organizes it, I take the blotters one by one from her, and we sit in silence at my desk and after a moment one of us says, “I *love this! It’s amazing!” and the other says, “Are you totally high? This thing is baldly derivative / poorly structured / lacking any persistence on skin / a total rip off of [fill in the blank]!” And then we argue about it.

Sometimes there is absolutely no connection between the package, bottle, and scent. Sometimes there is. De Baschmakoff designed the ground glass cylinder with its sloping shoulders to hold Bulgari’s “Eau Parfum�e au Th� Vert,” and it seems a visual reflection of that olfactory sculpture, mesmeric and cool and both sharp and rounded as the scent Jean-Claude Ellena created. I’ve always maintained that the bottle is irrelevant to the scent, that it’s all about the juice. But Marc Jacob’s Daisy? You take that thing out of the package, you see the plastic petals, that rubbery bouquet on that cap, and you’re dead. They’ve got you. I’m not saying that bottle designer Wilhelm Liden has necessarily made a more perfect creation here than perfumer Alberto Morillas. But I sort of think he has. This visual design of Liden’s mediates-introduces you to, makes you anticipate, perfectly directs your expectations of-Morillas’s perfume, the product you’re buying. Or at least the product you’re theoretically buying, although I’ve never heard so many times, “I saw the bottle, and I had to buy it!” as I did with “Daisy.” The bottle won’t ensure that crucial second purchase, and the test of a perfume is-always-the second purchase, but it sure will get them to reach for the first.

There is a way to use the visual that is much less manipulative, that constitutes simply visual cues for identifying a collection, a house. Herm�s Orange, Chanel White, Jo Malone Daffodil, l’Artisan Parfumeur Black. Houses use marvelous Post-Modernist post-ironic artistic maneuvers, like the sans serif letters and metal cans of l’Eau d’Italie that, entirely by design, could not possibly be more removed from the Romanticist, neo-Renaissance, Symbolist olfactory paintings they enclose.

Sometimes I think they work and at the same time they don’t. The Armani perfumes of several years ago that looked like wrapped toffees, or shaving lotions, or tinned biscuits for astronauts-they were ingenious pieces of packaging, but I never had the sensation that they were anything other than ingenious pieces of packaging, and-I have to go back to my memory of it-weirdly enough I felt like these visually striking wrappings were so removed from the scents they contained that there was no visual contamination. Sometimes they’re iconic. The blood red square of Ralph Lauren’s first, astonishing effort in 1978, “Lauren”-his creative team had called on the legendary perfumer Bernard Chant, but designer Ben Kotyuk carved up Chant’s luscious liquor into blood-red cubes that you can’t forget, and the color is, indeed, a synethetic conversion of Chant’s perfume. Sometimes they’re genius. The brilliantly sublime minimalism of Prada’s packaging, its glass sheets covering the minimalist juices, each subtly seductive as a string of perfect cups of tea.

I told Shannon recently that I’d still prefer the unmarked lab samples. She said, “That’s an ideal for any critic, but then, you know, you wouldn’t be getting people’s real-world experience of the perfume.” Which is true.