The perfume industry makes the CIA look like an open book.

The world of perfume is big business, but it's a business built on preferences, noses, tastes, and the ability to protect your formulas.

There is no legal protection for a perfume formula. If I mix a bunch of ingredients and come up with a wonderful perfume, anybody who can figure out my recipe is free to market the perfume. There is actually a tiny sub-industry of chemists who are doing that very thing, trying to imitate perfumes with drug-store knockoffs labeled "Smells Like White Diamonds" or "Smells Like Eternity."

To protect formulas, perfume experts rely on one ancient and one modern technique. The ancient technique is secrecy. You could probably get the formula for Coca-Cola more easily than you could dig up the ingredients for a hot new scent. "Noses," the people who invent the scents, work in secrecy and often lead extremely low-profile lives despite the fact that they are highly sought after professionals.

Another secret of the perfume industry is a pretty "open secret." It's obvious to most perfumistas, and it ought to be obvious to people who buy perfume, even if they don't really think about it much. Here it is: The people who attach their names to the perfume are not the ones who invent it.

Coco Chanel did not concoct her legendary No. 5 in a Paris apartment; it was concocted in the 1920s by one of the world's great "noses," a Russian living in Paris by the name of Ernst Breaux. Celebrity perfumes today may be created with minimal to moderate involvement of their spokespeople, but the real creation of the scent is done by someone else. What this means is that when you buy a scent by J Lo or Beyonce or Liz Taylor or Paris Hilton, you are purchasing a product they agreed to endorse. So don't be too overawed by a celebrity on the label.

Good old-fashioned secrecy about perfume formulas still works great in the perfume industry, but that does not stop copycats from trying to steal the formulas. The modern technique to help prevent perfume piracy is making the perfumes incredibly complicated.

Way back in the 1920, the same approach was taken with perfumes like Chanel No. 5, Youth Dew, and Evening in Paris, in that they used dozens of ingredients in precise proportions. Even if you could figure out what most of the ingredients were (and Chanel No. 5 has over 100), you could spend a lifetime in the lab experimenting to get the proper balance.

Perfumes today are so extremely complex that it's hard to copy them.

There are two types of perfume copycat. The first is the legal type. The method is simple: identify a popular perfume and then create a much-cheaper imitation of it. It may or may not be a good imitation, but it's at least in the ballpark. They then package their product in a plain box and advertise it as a scent that "smells like X perfume."

This is legal, but it's really not a good thing. First of all, it probably does smell vaguely like the original, but it is doubtful that a "nose" who could steal the exact recipe for a perfume would work for one of these copycat labs. You're dealing with an approximation, and that's on the best day.

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