Dior Homme Sport joins Hermes’ Terre d’Hermes and Juicy Couture’s Dirty English as one of the most astonishing and wonderful masculine scents in years. It is astonishing because each of these houses created something excellent for men in an industry where, normally, men are simply thrown stripped-down feminine perfumes or offered fragrances better suited to stick deodorants. And it is wonderful because Dior Homme Sport is, quite simply, wonderful.

Claude Dir’s work for Juicy (Dirty English was released in April 2008) is terrifically wearable, leaving a residue of downtown smoke and wood mixed with a weirdly mouth-watering charred gourmand. It smells as if a Sunset-Boulevard cowboy — a future LA rock star in Ed Hardy jeans — had accidentally burnt both his leather belt and his dark chocolate brownies, and bottled it. You have to hand it to Juicy’s creative directors Gela Nash-Taylor and Pamela Skaist-Levy: they decorate their stores with bubble gum jars, yet repeatedly allow their perfumers to do interesting, serious work. Dirty English is the late-model Corvette to French perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena’s Aston Martin. Terre, too, has a sleek masculine-adrenaline charge (from March 2006), but Ellena has refined and polished it to an ultra-elegant Monte Carlo glow.

And now comes Francois Demachy, the emperor of Dior. If Dir has reworked the scent of woody smoke, and Ellena has crafted an ingenious earthy spice, Demachy has done something that is, in a sense, even more difficult: he’s taken the 1990s cliche of the “masculine fresh”, a trope incarcerated in the detergent chemistry of Cool Water by Davidoff, and ingeniously re-envisioned it.

This is one of those cases where the sequel may be better than the original, though the original was excellent. With Dior Homme, which launched in 2005, Olivier Polge managed to engineer two beautiful components in a single scent: a high-quality masculine with a clean core inside the warm, opalescent gray of the iris root. Demachy has taken Polge’s machine and added what at first seemed to me to be a Mediterranean seawater spray. The scent is extremely fresh and sporty, without so much as a trace of either Cool Water’s detergent or the ubiquitous citrus masculine top.

So, what is Dior Homme Sport? For a moment I thought “gourmand”, but then dismissed the idea. I am embarrassed to admit that it was only when a young perfumery student pointed it out to me that the key clicked into place: what Demachy has done here is calibrate the correct equilibrium between iris and ginger.

The result is a universally wearable cologne that should be part of every man’s scent wardrobe. It will be up to women to discover that they should be wearing it as well, although I would not be surprised to hear that Demachy was at work on a Dior Femme Sport.