There is a class of fragrance that lies somewhere between perfume and scent. On the one hand, there are classical perfumes — multifaceted works of olfactory art, based on ideas and built with complexes of raw materials, in styles as varied and intellectualised as pointillism and expressionism.

On the other, aromatherapy — mono-themed smells, generally built in minimalist (if not inchoate) style and structure, meant simply to hypnotise like the single, pulsing tone of a Buddhist bowl, lulling into a state of non-thought.

Where perfumes seek to convey ideas, aromas are designed to produce the opposite outcome, intentionally tamping down thought: the scent concept of being free of scent concepts.

The median approach seeks to build fragrances that use an idea but are still built from strikingly simple accords, conveying a concept but doing it on an instinctive level. Privet Bloom, which was released in 2007, is a good example.

The first scent to come from Hampton Sun — the luxury-products house that aims to erase the boundary between skincare and sun care — Privet Bloom is conceptually both elementary and visceral. The creative directors Salvatore Piazzolla and Grant Wilfley asked the perfumer Stephanie Hakes for the scent of the spring flowers blossoming on Hamptons privet bush hedges. (If its semiotics are less innocent — privet hedges are the kind of genteel barrier that, in the Hamptons, demarcate the shocking incomes generated by a different hedge, the fund kind — the concept is unmistakable.)

As for the scent, Hakes has chosen the most literalist interpretation. It smells, strikingly, like a raw, stripped-down spring bush — the leaves crushed between your fingers, the moist cut stem — with a bit of flower but (and this is impossible, of course) as if you were smelling the scent of the flower as a bud rather than as a blossom: This perfume is a green-floral that’s much more green than floral, and a schematic one at that.

Hakes has done a sketch, not a painting. Privet Bloom has a rough loveliness and is made, I’m guessing, of the perfumer’s basic floral and green molecules: cis-3-hexenol, geraniol, citral, linalool.

But it works. It operates between perfume and smell. There is an idea here. And there is a scent, one so immediate and clear it requires no thought.