Beauty Closet, Lisa Hoffman Japanese Agarwood Evening Fragrance

In my ideal world, makeup appears to be the natural, fortunate endowment of the person wearing it. The I-just-wake-up-looking-like-this look. You know.

Some people take this obsession to another level by insisting that though they smell incredible, no, they are not wearing any scent. The implication: My perfection is so complete, and your attraction to me so animal, that literally the air around me drives you wild with desire.

This was the gambit of my friend T.'s ex-boyfriend, privately referred to as The Ex-Con (it was a menacing, rugged handsomeness—not a criminal record—that distinguished him as such). "What are you wearing?" T. would demand. The Ex-Con would wonder, maybe it was his soap? in much the way a beautiful starlet claims to love cheeseburgers.

T. searched The Ex-Con's home and car but found nothing; it was only after they broke up and another man came along, smelling precisely like The Ex-Con, that the truth was revealed: Cacharel Pour Homme (super-stealthily, only available in Europe!).

A new perfume from Lisa Hoffman addresses this compulsion in a new and brilliant way. The scent is gorgeous—though called Japanese Agarwood, it is fresh and dewy, as opposed to the typical spicy-too-sexy "wood" thing. Hoffman has spun it into four intensities—Morning, Daytime, Evening, and Bedtime—so that if you were a person who just happened to naturally smell like Japanese Agarwood, your mysterious aromatic aura would seem to subtly shift during the day, as if in accordance with some unseen circadian-type rhythm. Bonus: All four versions come in mini, crack-vial-like rollerball bottles—ultra-stealth. A snooping significant other would take one look and think they were skincare.