I'grand traveling from New York to Berlin to see a man who makes a fragrance that smells like nil.

Nothing, and even so I've been told that grab
ing a whiff of someone wearing it turns 1 animalistic, the fragrance'southward pheromone-like qualities attracting responses that range from insistent inquiries to union proposals.

On both coasts fragrance boutiques, like 
Aedes Perfumery in New
 York and Scent Bar in Los 
Angeles, sell four to 12
 bottles a twenty-four hours of Escentric 
Molecules Molecule 01, 
a fairly high number for 
a give-and-take-of-oral fissure indie
 scent with a price that 
begins at $80 for one ounce. Rihanna, Beyoncé, and Jay Z all allegedly wear information technology, despite having their own eponymous fragrances on the market. The late architect Zaha Hadid was also a fan; she was known to respond to admirers by saying, "I'chiliad non going to tell you what information technology is." Kate Moss wears it too.

More From Boondocks & Country

preview for Style Section Curated

There is no advertising. The minimal bottle doesn't fifty-fifty accept a cap. It is not widely known outside the fragrance earth. Is this the effluvious equivalent of the emperor's new dress or Beloved Potion No. 9?

Earlier I get out for Germany, I stop past
the Aedes shop in the West Village, the outset place in the Usa to stock Escentric Molecules. There are 6 varieties in the range, but the clear star is Molecule 01. It contains the molecule Iso E Super, a common synthetic ingredient used in many perfumes for its flossy, woody quality and the fact that it smells different on everyone—or, maybe, that information technology makes y'all smell more like yourself. Karl Bradl, one of the bazaar's owners, explains to me that when it'south offset sprayed on your skin, your nose may not register it. Then it comes and goes. "The actualization and disappearing of the scent, the barely there fragrance, yet the unbelievable reaction you get from people when wearing it, has created some sort of mystery," he says.

Its creation started with
an experiment. In 1990, Geza 
Schoen, a young perfumer at 
Haarmann & Reimer (now 
Symrise), started to suspect
that Iso East Super was, past itself,
responsible for the success of
the earth'southward best-selling scents, 
the kind people buy again 
and once more. Ane night he asked
 his friend Michael to clothing 
ii drops of it to a bar. They 
had a potable, 10 minutes went
 by, and a adult female came upward to
 them and asked what exactly 
it was that smelled so proficient. "It'south probably me," Michael said. "Just you have to talk to him," he said, pointing to Schoen, who asked her which fragrances she usually preferred. She named Lancôme Trésor and Dior Fahrenheit. The first contains 20 pct Iso E Super; the second, a men's scent, 25 per centum. Suspicion confirmed.

I told my husband about the fragrance, and he was characteristically skeptical. He fabricated the Love Potion No. ix analogy, and and then, in a reverential tone, he said, "Genius marketing." I explained that there was no marketing and regaled him with tales of its underground success.
"I'd try it," he said,
 though he'due south never 
worn fragrance in
his life. Friends who 
swear by Molecule 01 
tell the same story:
 They go stopped 
every where they go,
 on the street, at the
market place, out at night.
 Despite all this, I
 was reluctant to try 
it, worried I'd fall in 
love and abandon the fragrance I've worn for years, Diptyque l'Ombre dans l'Eau, which is my signature. (A friend one time caught a whiff of the candle version, Baies, and later told me, "I looked all over for you.")

I try Molecule 01 a few days in a row, holding my arm out and passing my nose dorsum and forth over it, every bit I was taught to do (I interned for a prominent perfumer for a few summers as a teenager). I try repeatedly. Nothing. I go see a friend. We encompass. She says, "You odor musky, practiced." Afterwards I layer Molecule 01 with the Diptyque—and and so I'm hooked. Information technology amplifies my usual odor, making it more pronounced and longer-lasting; I experience every bit if I scent more like myself.

Schoen didn't release Molecule 01 until 2005, xv years after he developed it. During that time he lived in New York, Paris, London, and Singapore, segueing from working at a big fragrance house to doing private commissions, and then returning to Berlin in 2005 to work on his ain.

Schoen lives in the Kreuzberg area of Berlin. The entryway to his habitation
is entirely brilliant green, including the floor. Vintage mad scientist–style French bubble lamps gurgle with floating beads in orange, blood-red, majestic, and blue. In that location are Joseph Beuys portraits on the wall and assorted paraphernalia, including a signed plastic bag Schoen was given by the artist when they met in 1972. His childhood abode in Kassel was similarly eclectic. "The message was to do things, try things, differently," he says.

A few streets down, Schoen'south grandparents had a huge garden where they grew assorted fruits and vegetables.
 It was there he remembers first paying close attention to taste and smell. Though Schoen has a complete palette
of raw materials from the fragrance house IFF at his disposal, he prefers spare compositions that challenge the norm. "Everything in the fragrance manufacture is programs and parameters," he says. "I really relish doing it the full opposite style." He is currently at work on the fragrance for a wildly in-demand bag line, to be released later this year. This calendar month sees Project Renegades, three fragrances realized by star perfumers Schoen, Mark Buxton, and Bertrand Duchaufour. All these men are classically trained just known for cool iconoclasm, subverting the established codes of past masters and the current market. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Schoen'southward contribution plays with a unmarried ingredient: pink pepper. "Simplicity," he says, "was missing in perfumery."

Liquid, Fluid, Perfume, Glass, Plumbing fixture, Bottle, Transparent material, Drinkware, Glass bottle, Silver,

Photograph by James Wojcick, styled past Will Kahn