La Nuit de L’Homme, the brand-new masculine fragrance by the perfumers Anne Flipo, Dominique Ropion and Pierre Wargnye for Yves Saint Laurent, shows the two roles a “flanker” can play.

Design houses create “brands” (as individual perfumes are known in the industry) and spend millions of dollars to anchor them in the overcrowded collective commercial waters. In 2006, Yves Saint Laurent aggressively introduced L’Homme on a public relations platform of breathtaking ubiquity and energetic style. From billboards and magazines, a man in need of a haircut glared at us. On YouTube, under video ads in which the camera swirled around him, plaintive posts appeared: “What’s the name of this man?..What’s his phone number?” Responses ranged from the regretful — “It’s the French actor Olivier Martinez but I don’t have his phone number” — to the awed: “This is a MAN.”

Olfactorily, L’Homme was a well-executed 21st-century update of the traditional masculine scent: fewer herbal aromatics, light on the citrus water, with a structure of dark wood and butch spice polished to a golf club’s dull sheen. YSL scored a serious commercial hit — the market research group NPD reports that in sales for the second quarter of 2009, L’Homme was No. 11 — but the success was a bit generic and dangerously fungible.

Enter L’Homme’s flanker, and here is where things get interesting.

To translate: Product extensions, known as “flankers,” are common in the film industry, for instance — Spiderman comes out and is a huge hit, and Spiderman 2 is its flanker. Yes, La Nuit de L’Homme extended the brand, as a flanker is meant to, leveraging the millions that marketers had invested. Even the hexagonal cap on the bottle was repeated. And in the same manner that Christian Bale inherited Batman’s keys to Gotham City from George Clooney, the French actor Vincent Cassel took over for Martinez. (This time, YSL generously supplied YouTube with both the ad and behind-the-scenes footage.) This marketing role is the first one a flanker plays.

But a flanker fragrance’s second — and, in the end, infinitely more important — role is olfactory. This can go one of two ways: It either just mimics the same character, or it takes the original character and reinterprets it. Happily, this is a successful reinterpretation: YSL has put something very nice on the market.

Flipo, Ropion and Wargnye have built an appropriately understated but definitive masculine gourmand scent — smoky black Himalayan tea, fragrant Indian cardamom, spicy cinnamon bark — to surround the fragrance’s traditionalist core. Not only does this save Nuit from being just another fragrance in the crowd, but it’s more viscerally attractive because it is literally more delicious.

But not too much more. The gourmand aspect is subtle enough that an hour or so after Nuit is sprayed, the flanker burns off, and the original L’Homme is left on the skin. Which is a bit of a shame. Had YSL let the perfumers take Nuit further, really push the envelope, it could have been a solid four stars.