Beat writer goes where his nose leads him

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With great fanfare, not to mention a whiff of tuberose and a top note of musk, the New York Times has hired a perfume critic. The smelly among us don't know whether to laugh, cry, splash on some Jean Nate or make bad puns:

He must have a nose for news. He must make scents. It's not the new factory, silly, it's the olfactory. Why, Mr. Sulzberger, why Punch, all's smell that ends smell.

Yes, yes. But the nose does know. Chandler Burr, a dashing Manhattan writer who speaks four languages, has been hired by the Times to review and rate fragrances in a column called Scent Strip, complete with a star rating system and lots of poesy, maybe a few onomatopoeias, even.

"Darkness, when it is crystalline and somewhat luminous, may be the most difficult quality to capture in a perfume," Mr. Burr wrote in his inaugural column, and with those words, the entire fragrance industry uneasily pondered the notion that this scion of fragrance might make or break a newly introduced perfume.

Mr. Burr is interested in the hoity-toity side of things rather than condemning some hapless cologne to purgatory down at CVS.

"Every other art has a serious criticism. I believe perfume should as well," Mr. Burr said recently.

He has described one scent as a "radiant glass roof sensation," another as "a box of truffles with the lid on," still another as "insecticide inside an aluminum cell."

Here at the Questionable Odors Desk, we hope and pray Mr. Burr does not come down with a cold.

Meanwhile, Mr. Sulzberger -- as in Mr. Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the hallowed and hair-raising Times -- may be onto something that could make big waves, fig- and green-tea-scented, of course.

Fragrance has billowed into a $6 billion-a-year industry in America, with a thousand perfumes on the market at any given moment, according to our tastefully aromatic pals at the Fragrance Foundation, an industry group currently gearing up for Fragrance Week, which is sort of like Fleet Week, but smells much better.