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.

Gucci Envy Me , the curious misstep from 2004. Whereas the 1997 Gucci Envy by Maurice Roucel is a masterpiece, Envy Me, by Karine Dubreuil (who did the excellent Mure et Musc Extreme for l’Artisan Parfumeur), is a supermarket fragrance. Its aesthetic poverty is reinforced by its dismal technical construction. In other words, the materials not only smell like plastic flowers and aspartame, they also fit together poorly. The machinery is rough, unfinished, inelegant.