Jasmine, Tuberose and Power

The Little Book of Perfumes: The Hundred Classics. By Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez. 128 pages. Viking. $18.

Perfume: The Alchemy of Scent. By Jean-Claude Ellena. 176 pages. Arcade. $22.95.

Have you ever found a perfume that seemed to have been made for you, a perfume that mingled with your skin in such an arresting way that a stranger in an elevator might turn and ask: “Excuse me, that scent ... what is it? Where I can I get it?”

Maybe it was Après l’Ondée (Guerlain), which the great nose Luca Turin (the subject of the 2003 book “The Emperor of Scent”) compares to “a first-class funeral, complete with four horses and gray ostrich feather,” but suffused with “optimistic sunlight.” Or maybe it was the fruity-floral Lolita Lempicka, which Mr. Turin’s colleague, Tania Sanchez, characterizes in their guide to the best 100 fragrances, “The Little Book of Perfumes,” as “like cleavage set to trumpets,” backed by a “somewhat louche and curiously masculine sweet woody section.”

Or could it be Chanel’s latest offering? This autumn on television, a fragrance was introduced, worn by a dazzling woman in red — “gorgeous, wealthy, a free spirit” — who floated into a ballroom, bewitching a crowd of men in black tie. As the men stared, goggle-eyed, a narrator huskily listed the woman’s disturbing allurements, like: “her ex-boyfriend was a club promoter,” and “she’s exquisite, but she also lived in Vegas for 11 years.” As a female voice-over repeatedly whispered, “Red Flag,” the Champagne-swilling femme fatale, played by Kristen Wiig, soon lurched off screen, hissing with a wild leer that Red Flag was “the only perfume that warns men, ‘I’m [expletive] crazy.’ ”

Obviously, this was no official commercial: it was a parody on “Saturday Night Live.” But a hidden truth lies beneath the joke. Scent is powerful, and perfumes carry coded information that tweaks the brain’s caveman memory sensors.

In “Perfume: The Alchemy of Scent,” Jean-Claude Ellena — the exclusive perfumer for Hermès and the inventor of First from Van Cleef & Arpels and Eau Parfumée au Thé Vert from Bulgari (among other potions) — explains that in the distant human past, “detecting a predator as quickly as possible was a matter of life and death.” A dangerous odor sent the helpful message: run for your life.

Today’s professional composers of perfumes seek to elicit a different command: Come hither. Although Mr. Ellena works in a French villa in the foothills of Grasse, among white and gray rocks sprinkled with broom and lavender, he travels the world in search of evocative sensations, which he then recreates in his Alpine lab.

In 2005, a stroll through a garden island on the Nile provoked him to create the Hermès scent Un Jardin Sur le Nil. “The idea came to me in an alley of mango trees,” he recalls. The branches drooped with heavy, aromatic green fruit. “The odor seduced me. A profusion of fragrant images, of resins, of orange peel, of grapefruit, of carrot, of opoponax, of juniper, an odor that was sweet and sour, vivid and mild. I gave in to it, let the odor caress my senses and take possession of me.”

Breathe at your own risk. “Virtuosity,” Mr. Ellena murmurs, “is a form of seduction.”

These days, however, when it comes to perfume, virtuosity also is a form of advanced scientific and chemical experimentation. A little more than a century ago, when the mass production of perfumes was in its dewy youth, perfumers relied on natural ingredients: tons of jasmine blossoms and carnation petals, vats of civet and musk, citrus peels by the barrel. But in recent decades, many ingredients have been prohibited by the International Fragrance Association, an organization that focuses on fragrance safety, largely because a small percentage of sensitive sniffers are allergic to them.

This means that your grandmother’s beloved Joy (by Jean Patou) does not pack the punch it once did. As recently as 2007, according to Mr. Turin, Joy’s rose, jasmine, ylang-ylang and tuberose mixture still smelled “huge, luscious, and utterly wonderful.” But as of 2011, thanks to new European allergen restrictions, Ms. Sanchez reports, “The indolic jasmine has mostly gone and taken some lovely civet filth with her.” Mr. Turin remarks, “It’s not Joy, but it’s not sadness, either.”

But the news from the fragrance front is not all bad; perfumes, like everything else, undergo a process of change, a “gradual evolution in taste,” Mr. Ellena calls it. And new technologies and new consumer preferences have broadened the variety of bouquets that aficionados can sample.

As an alchemist of scent, Mr. Ellena can authoritatively chart shifts in the lab that have transformed the olfactory palette. In recent years, a whole new cabinet of aromas — magnolia flower, pink pepper berries and absolutes of sambac jasmine and osmanthus — has opened to the perfume industry, as fragrances used in China to flavor teas, drinks and tobaccos have spread to the atomizer, tantalizing the taste buds as well as the nose.

Back in the 1980s, another sense drawer was unlocked when molecules from detergents and fabric softeners migrated into the perfume industry, imparting a “message of cleanliness” through “simple, linear, recognizable” scents like Drakkar Noir, Cool Water and Eternity. France, Mr. Ellena claims, reacted against such “puritan values” in the early ’90s by producing a “sensual and greedy torrent of candy floss, chocolate, tea, figs, plums, praline, licorice,” and so on — as in Thierry Mugler’s Angel. Encouragingly, Angel appears in the Turin and Sanchez book sporting “a covering of unsentimental, icy brightness above its overripe (some say ‘rotting’) rumble.”

Both of these books make you want to run to a perfume counter and test your impressions against the authors’ romantic rhapsodies. At the Annick Goutal boutique at Bergdorf Goodman, the perfumer will give you his card to help you track your floral obsessions. And even mainstream perfumers furnish their sales force with flashcards to edify the curious. The spritz attendant at the Estée Lauder counter at Lord & Taylor can produce a flip book showing the ingredients for White Linen’s basket of floral scent: Bulgarian rose, jasmine, lily of the valley, violet, orris root, vetiver, moss and amber.

To an untutored nose, the combination may evoke a powdery old lady with a thin nose. But to Ms. Sanchez, who knows whereof she smells, White Linen is “a canonical expression of the American ideal of sex appeal: squeaky clean, healthy, depilated and exfoliated, well rested and ready for the day.”

As Mr. Ellena points out, any perfume is only “a succession of olfactory moments” and the success of this moment depends as much on the spell of the wearer as on the smell of the fragrance.