It’s a cloudless fall day when I go to meet Yann Vasnier, one of the world’s leading perfumiers, at the Givaudan offices in Manhattan. Located two blocks from Central Park, Givaudan is housed in an antiseptic steel-and-glass building that gives no indication of the Willy Wonka-esque fragrance factory hidden inside, or of the man who, like Wonka, combines imagination, science, and lab savvy to concoct his scent confections.
    Vasnier meets me in his floor’s lobby, apologizing even though he’s just a minute late. He’s trim and handsome, wearing a Lacoste polo with light gray jeans, and has his dark hair neatly parted. “I was just in the park,” he explains. “Can I get you coffee, tea?” He seems perturbed when I decline and, like a good host, gets me a tall glass of water anyway. When we arrive at his office, my jaw drops.
    Every surface area in his room—desk, windowsill, floor—is covered with perfume bottles: tiny glass cylinders, ornate magenta sculptures, gold, blue, and clear orbs, clustered together so that there’s hardly room to set down my recorder. Sunlight shines through the bottles stacked along the windowsill so that they appear to glow.
    “This is overwhelming,” I say.
    “You’ve never been in a fragrance house before,” he observes with a bemused smile.

                                           ***
    Vasnier grew up in Brittany, France surrounded by flowers and herbs. His parents’ house stood on the grounds of a sprawling garden, filled with a hundred rose trees, as well as magnolias, rosemary, thyme, and many other flora. His older brother, now a landscape architect, studied aromatic plants in school, and Yann traveled with him from Italy to the Caribbean researching species—an adventure he recites nonchalantly, as if everyone spends their youth hunting exotic plants. Finally, Vasnier enrolled at the prestigious Institut Supérieur International du Parfum (ISIP), where he received his formal training.
    Now 34, Vasnier has created some of the most popular fragrances worldwide: scents for Marc Jacobs, Tom Ford, Comme des Garçons, and even, yes, Axe. Although some projects are more creative than others, he says he often begins with a story. I watch as he opens bottles, dipping paper strips into their contents and handing them to me, reserving some for himself as well.
    “That one,” he says of a scent called Aleksander, in which my blunt nose picks out pine and leather, “is all about Pushkin, the Russian writer. It’s this time when his wife was having a French lover, and there was a duel. It was in Russia, it was really cold, and so there is the whole story of the birch, the snow, the vodka, the fur, and the boots.” Next we smell L’Etrog, an evocation of the ancient Jewish harvest holiday Sukkot, which contains notes of Hebrew citrus fruit, date, and myrtle.
    It all sounds romantic until Vasnier beckons me to his computer and pulls up the formulas for the fragrances, which are wincingly elaborate. Some of the scents have over 50 ingredients.
    Finally he takes me to the lab. In the center are huge robotic machines, which are stocked with the more common ingredients and do the first round of mixing. Arranged around them are thousands of additional bottles. Lab employees dressed in white medical coats stare intently at their work, though they still nod along to Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable” and, later, Bowie’s “Space Oddity.”
    Hidden behind a glass barrier in a far corner are the “stinky ones”: chemicals that smell like cat pee, horse manure, rotting cabbage, and “baby burp,” which are used in trace amounts to enhance floral and fruit scents. Vasnier smiles patiently while I giggle.
    As if to distract me, he leads me to a different area, where he opens bottles of pure orange flower, almond, and vanilla bean, holding them under my nose.
    “Amazing,” I say, one by one.
    He nods. “Scent is powerful,” he says. “You can remember an ex or memories of your grandmother by just smelling a fragrance.” Then he shrugs and closes each lid.