What in the world is the point of Daisy? I have rarely smelled a perfume with a personality so impossible to pin down. Chimerical.

Start with the most basic question: Is it good or bad? Hard to say. What do you consider good — a perfume with a clear character? Then no.

Daisy, a 2007 launch that the perfumer Alberto Morillas made under the creative direction of Marc Jacobs and Coty’s vice president of marketing, Michael D’Arminio, is almost mesmerising in its violent resistance to being mesmerising.

A perfume built to play a specific role? Then emphatically yes. Floral without flowers, sweet without sugar, somehow a pretty face without allowing a single feature of that face ever to come into distinct focus. (The only distinct aspect here is its demographic appeal: The perfume skews young.)

It seems to have a peculiar engineering that allows it to melt into any background, to speak with a female voice emanating from invisible speakers somewhere over your head, to travel under any door like smoke and to occupy, comfortably if spectrally, any space.

After a few days wearing it, I remembered where I had experienced a similar sensation. In the haunting, eerie science-fiction movie Sunshine, the director Danny Boyle faced the problem of casting the role of the voice of a spaceship flying in the future toward a dying sun. He wound up choosing the young British-African RADA-trained actress Chipo Chung, and the movie is brilliantly and quietly suffused in this voice that emanates from the ship’s walls in an accent as elegant as it is unplacable. (Chung’s natural accent is apparently lightly Zimbabwean.)

The spaceship speaks in tones pleasant, female, subtle yet clear, palpable yet diaphanous, ever-present but never seen. It serves as a crystalline, calming and just slightly ominous counterpoint to the movie’s events, and I suspect that Daisy will play that role for those who will wear it.

People who come across it on your skin will stop and hesitate, attempting to classify the scent, but will find it impossible to pin down.