Bond No. 9 boutique, 9 Bond Street, New York

There are a lot of clichés about American perfumery. Americans like to smell clean, while everyone else in the world likes to smell dirty; American perfumes are all about things you can eat, mostly fruit but occasionally coffee, chocolate or cake; the United States produces a lot of smells, but has yet to produce a truly great fragrance house. Bond No. 9 aims to challenge all of these.

But does it succeed?

Hmm.

I spent a long time in the flagship store, fighting off some supercilious assistants, all armed with that overtrained, po-faced, robotic sales patter that some American corporations seem to think the customer would like more than talking to an actual responsive human with a personality, a sense of humour and some opinions.

Bodes badly, right?

Right.

I see the Bon-Bon Box (above) in the window, What a lovely thing! How shiny! Lots of little smells, beautifully packaged! An ideal gift for Violet, Beverly or Mr Atrocity! I sally forth to the testing counter to poke my nose into their business.

Chinatown is supposed to be Bond's truly great scent, so that's where I start. And, yes, it's good. A complex, intelligent peach'n'patchouli oriental that manages to be elegant and pleasing at every stage. But that's it. Pleasing. I am pleased. There's nothing about Chinatown that challenges or surprises me. It is chic and polished, and as it progresses goes through a formal, controlled, unobjectionable sequence. It's a lot like the sales assistants.

It's good, all right? And there's something alluring about perfect poise. But I can't find it in my heart - or, for that matter, my nose - to love something so very orderly. So very safe.

Next I try Andy Warhol Silver Factory, one of a range inspired by the artist. Again, it's good. A smart, careful balancing of Warhol's favourite smells: violet, incense and woods. It dries down to something nice. It is nice. I am pleased. I might be even more pleased than I was with Chinatown. And yet my heart rate is unchanged.

I look bored. "This is our bestseller," monotones the assistant, spraying me with a cloud of something purple called The Scent of Peace. Horrific name, and horrific... at last! Something that produces a reaction! Unfortunately, that reaction is sneezing, because I'm being drowned in grapefruit! Look, if I wanted to smell like The Body Shop, I wouldn't have to spend $130 on a bottle. And that's the small size. (They vary. Silver Factory comes in at a whopping $230.)

I plead for something less like bath gel, and a succession of spicies is paraded in front of me: Nuits de Noho (vanilla/patchouli), Great Jones (cedar), Wall Street (lavender/vetiver), HOT Always (cinnamon/bergamot). They're all fine. Great Jones is very fine. I sniff it again. Yes, very fine. I am pleased.

It's very hard to object to any of them. Except they're so... thin. There's no body, no sensuousness, no emotion.

Tom Wolfe, in that quintessential New York novel Bonfire of the Vanities, describes a certain type of socialite women. These women are ageing but heavily into artificial preservation, rail-thin, perfectly blowdried and manicured: simultaneously satirising their appearance and their brittle vapidity, he calls them "social X-rays".

I bet the social X-rays love Bond No. 9.

I stumbled back on to the street, outwardly pleased but inwardly disappointed, my wallet no lighter. Bond No. 9 makes a very tasteful range of well-produced scents. If you wear one (pretty much any one, apart from that horrible Peace thing), you will project an aura of immaculate luxury, and you won't offend anyone.

That's just not what I'm after in a perfume. But, then again, I am a European.

Bois Blond (Parfumerie Generale, 2007, Pierre Guillaume)

The perfume opens with light early summer grass, hints of citrus and fresh wood shavings. There is a note of very green, sappy wood and a hint of spice. This is a heady mixture, it is much brighter than I had expected given the strong presence of cedar. The spice remains and is joined by musk and a more aged wood as the perfume really dries down and warms to skin temperature. The mixture of wood, spices and musk almost evoke old-fashioned wax furniture polish, a rich scent with a little astringent sharpness. This sharpness mellows after an hour or so though a certain spice element remains. Though it isn't actually an ingredient I perceive a coriander undertone: spicy and deep yet not too obviously comestible. This combines with the cedar and musk to create a warm, slightly sweaty skin scent, which for me epitomises the height of summer. The smell of my own skin on a long, hot summer day is a constant source of satisfaction and this perfume really captures the masculine aroma and the spice of drying sweat.

As the day and the season wear on the scent settles with wet hay. It still has a hint of sweat though this element no longer comes to the fore. The whole fragrance settles for the rest of the day and toys with that boundary between perfect ripeness and the onset of decay. Towards the end there is a hint of the sweetness of silage and hay barns. This scent gently fades out as the night itself draws in.

French Lover (known as Bois d'Orage in the US; Frédéric Malle Editions de Parfums, 2007, Pierre Bourdon)

For some reason, the name 'French Lover' made me assume this scent was floral. Now I think about it, I can't imagine why I would have made that assumption. I can only guess that my mind went Lover -> Love -> Romance -> Roses. This Chypre fragrance is a very long way from that.

French Lover undergoes a bizarre and unexpected transformation as it dries down, which takes hours. The first rush is iris and cedar, very bitter and resonant of L'Artisan Parfumeur's Méchant Loup. It's strong and masculine and woody and it lasts for an hour or two, mellowing a little, before taking a strange turn into soft, warm amber, and crystalline-sweet benzoin, like vanilla and church incense. It takes the whole day to change over from one to the other and it lifts my spirits as it does so, moving from fiery, enthusiastic energy to safe, comforting smoky warmth, directly counteracting the increase in my stress levels during a day at work.

(As an aside, why did they feel the need to call this scent 'Bois d'Orage' in the US? Is it the same thing as 'Freedom Fries' - they've decided the word 'French' is bad because they don't like French people? If so, do they really think that it's better to go from the name being French to the name being in French? What difference does that make? Or is it the word 'Lover' to which they object, because sex is an affront to American values or something?)

What a magical and fascinating fragrance this is, with its extraordinary masculine-to-feminine path. I'd have called it French Lovers. And I'll be getting another bottle after this one, I can tell.

Acqua di Parma (Acqua di Parma, 1916)

Often have I idly wondered: what, exactly, did an 18th century German smell like? I can hazard a guess: a combination of Liverwurst, Lebkuchen, Lederhosen and elaborately-greased whiskers. For some reason, the Italian Giovanni Maria Farina found himself in the German city of Köln in 1709, and apparently found the odour of the inhabitants so noxious that he had to invent Eau de Cologne to cover it up. The resulting light citrussy-herbal concoction turned out to be one of the most influential scents in the whole history of perfume.

Farina's Eau de Cologne was not original. Hungarians had hogged the market in the Middle Ages with their Eau d'Hongrie, a similar herbal fragrance with citric elements. Most Italian states had a profumeria churning out bottles of the same sort of thing, notably the Farmacia di Santa Maria Novella in Florence, which is still going strong today. Farina's genius, then, was principally in bringing sensory civilisation to soothe the savage Hun, and in turning the unlikely town of Köln into a world-famous producer of nice smells.

Farina's invention was widely imitated, but not perfected for more than two centuries. In the middle of the First World War, an unknown group of Parmense noses created the fragrance that would henceforth define the highpoint of Eaux de Cologne. With excellent chutzpah, they renamed it: Acqua di Parma. Both the Germans and the French could consider themselves to have been flicked the Vs.

Many great colognes are still available - among them, the S. Maria Novella one, and the authentic Kölnischwasser 4711. But Acqua di Parma bests the lot of them. Something about its minutely perfected combination of notes is more cosmopolitan and more seductive than anything comparable. And, crucially, it lasts much longer. A burst of fresh lemon to start is followed by a clever blend which manages to capture a sexy, laid-back, interwar complexity. The fresh middle notes of rose, lavender, rosemary and verbena don't dip too far into femininity to put off the men. And the woody base notes of vetiver, cedar and sandalwood don't veer too far into masculinity to put off the women.

Lots of the most sexy and stylish people of the twentieth century noticed how very, very good this was. Among the wearers of Acqua di Parma were Cary Grant and David Niven, Ava Gardner and Lana Turner; also Audrey Hepburn, but I don't like her so we'll draw a veil over that. The specific genius of AdP resides in the fact that it is equally sexy on a man or a woman (and, no doubt, on an intersexual). It makes everyone who wears it seem more sophisticated, richer, better-read, more widely travelled and better in bed.

I buy a bottle of this stuff every summer, and every time I spray it on I feel like I'm in a fast car being driven by a tall, dark, chiselled-featured young novelist around the Mediterreanean in the 1930s, on our way to get married in Monte Carlo just before he goes off to volunteer for the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, in which he will have a hero's death when he leads Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell and a group of wild-eyed socialist peasants to stop a Nazi division from burning down an orphanage by wrestling them to the ground with his bare hands... mmm... yeah.

Be wary of the perils on your journey. The shop assistant will probably try to persuade you to buy one of AdP's alternative smells: the dodgy Lavanda, the nose-itching Iris Nobile, or one of the horrific Blu Mediterraneo collection, all of which smell like over-iced cake that has been left out in the Tuscan sun for too long. Don't be diverted. You can have the Colonia Assoluta if you really must, but you will regret any attempt to improve on the original. Because it has now been three hundred years since Farina's marketing coup, and nobody's done it better. Acqua di Parma is perfect.