Just as steel, a new high-tech metal, allowed the rise of the skyscraper, Pfizer’s 1966 discovery of a new molecule called methylbenzodioxepinone allowed the creation of the oceanic scents of the 1990s. The molecule, with the trade name of Calone, had a fresh marine/ozonic scent, and the perfumer Jacques Cavallier’s 1992 L’Eau d’Issey, which he made for Issey Miyake, is Calone’s paradigmatic use.

Simplified to an extreme and as linear as a perfume can be (“linear” in this case means that you smell exactly the same thing from the very first second you spray it on to the end of the day when you shower it off), L’Eau d’Issey fathered an entire sub-school of oceanic perfumes.

In fact it is credited — probably correctly — along with a few other huge hits (cKOne, Cool Water) with launching the international phenomenon that was, in the ’90s, the definition of scent: the smell of ocean breeze along a cool beach that ruffles the sea grass and sweeps through natural perfection.

Yet today? The oceanics, which used to smell exciting, are now dated. This was always a breeze that assiduously avoided the slightest hint of anything actually natural: there are no fish in this ocean, no decaying driftwood on this photo-ready beach, no smoke from a bonfire — in fact no sign of human or natural life at all.

L’Eau d’Issey was always an ocean breeze you watched on a gas plasma screen in hi-definition: the sensation, via plastic, glass and electronics, but not the actual experience. There is a way to express this that is as diplomatic as it is precise: L’Eau d’Issey was a revolution in its time, it was masterfully built, and it may be coming to the end of its aesthetic usefulness.