One way to make a great scent in the masculine genre is to take a feminine and morph it so brilliantly you can’t ignore it, yet make it unplaceable enough that people have no references and, thus, aren’t able to force it into a gender.

The creative team at Thierry Mugler has come up with exactly this sort of scent, and it is an absolute delight. Moreover, it’s different, a tingling shock to the system like going on a new ride at Disney World that rushes you into an impossibly cool turquoise sea or a gigantic concrete-and-fibreglass mountain. It disorients and startles, yet you can enjoy all the shocks without ever feeling any alarm because it is overwhelmingly about one thing: fun. (See Clinique’s Happy for Men as a reference.)

The perfumer Alberto Morillas does solid, mass-appeal commercial with the best of them, but with the 2001 issue of Thierry Mugler Cologne, under the artistic direction of Thierry Mugler and Vera Strubi, Morillas has committed an act of authentic creativity.

Take the tired adjective “fresh,” molecularly re-engineer it, give it a space suit and a jet pack, and you’ve got something that enhances your skin like limes from an unimaginable orchard in a distant galaxy. The brilliance of this utterly alluring scent is that it references nothing in nature yet references nothing chemical or man-made. It is astral citrus, stardust.

The secret of the juice is a very unusual accord Morillas created — those in the industry know, and it is a shame the marketing people won’t talk about it — but it all adds up to as perfect an innovative fresh masculine as you can get. (It’s great on women — I’d say equally great if women didn’t already have 10 times more official choices than men didn’t.)

The usual technical problem with citrus/fresh scents — lack of persistence on skin — removes one star, but keep a bottle in your office drawer, and you’re good. No, actually you’re rather awesome.