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Perfume is made of equal parts art and science. Its practitioners rely upon highly developed olfactory senses and mysterious intuitions to create humankind's only invisible adornment. Scent is also a complex form of chemistry, a laboratory for rearranging arcane molecules.

It's also a business, and in reporting upon it, Chandler Burr has become acutely aware of scents in everyday life. In fact, he says, "I remember places by smell." In The Perfect Scent: A Year Inside the Perfume Industry in Paris and New York, Mr. Burr, the perfume critic of The New York Times, chronicles his months of unprecedented access to the Kremlinesque world of professional parfumeurs. This is a huge industry worth billions of dollars annually. Everyone hopes to create a legend such as Chanel No. 5 (still such a formidable seller after 87 years that the industry calls it le monstre), "but it is an expensive roll of the dice every time you try to launch one."

Perfume's empire has two capitals; the newer one is New York and the older one, of course, is Paris. Mr. Burr first follows the charismatic Jean-Claude Ellena as he becomes the first in-house parfumeur for Parfums Hermès, creating the fragrance Un Jardin sur le Nil (A Garden on the Nile). Then in New York, the author observes as Coty executives work with Sex and the City actress Sarah Jessica Parker on her first signature fragrance, Lovely. Mr. Burr alternates chapters between the two cities, plus a jaunt down the Nile with Mr. Ellena and the Hermès team.

Mr. Burr, who's fluent in French, frequently translates words and bits of dialogue to speed the non-Francophone along. This employment of French, necessary though it is, means that the chapters featuring Ms. Parker may be more accessible for some readers, and therefore more fun (or less work) to read than the Paris chapters.

Mr. Burr uses his background in science to explain the chemistry of fragrances. At times he's a bit schoolmasterish in his zeal to educate, and technical explanations occasionally impede his otherwise lively narrative.

Fragrance is a notoriously difficult thing to put into words, but Mr. Burr is fearless, often outrageously so, in his writing. Wonderful scents transport him: "A molecule that smells beautifully of clean, pure light." But he's at his best when describing scents he hates.

"I smell Kenneth Cole [fragrances], I think of the hole in the ozone layer," he writes of the fluorocarbons in that brand's signature. "The deepest pit of hell, however, is reserved for the suits slaving over the Hugo Boss brand in the dark corners of Procter and Gamble.

"... I know someone who believes that Hugo Boss scents constitute proof that God does not exist. I would disagree – atheism is a rational response to the chaos of life, while the rational response to any perfume by Hugo Boss is to run, screaming, into someone's parking lot – but the scents certainly do make you think of Agent Orange." And he proceeds mercilessly to flay those scents:

Soul: "The chemical reek of deep-space travelers frozen in goo in suspended animation."

Edition: "Insecticide."

Number One: "If the name of this perfume is not Vile and Toasty, it is only due to the lack of the appropriate application of genius in the Hugo Boss marketing department."

Elements: "A cologne most appropriately worn by electrical appliances."

And finally, Hugo Boss Woman: "This is a scent for a woman who has no taste and absolutely no interest in having any. This is for a woman who loves a man who wears Vile and Toasty."

Midway through The Perfect Scent, Mr. Burr sums up perfumery as "a parade of emperor's new clothes." It is a marvelous illusion, existing first in the mind of the parfumeur, then in the bottle, then on the skin of the one who wears it. Only after it is inhaled by the human nose does a fragrance become what it really is: the stuff of memories.

A Year Inside the Perfume Industry

in Paris and New York

Chandler Burr

(Henry Holt, $25)

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