In an industry suffocating amid all sorts of constrictions (most of them marketing poses that falsify, straightjacket and cheapen everything they touch), the niche New York perfume house Bond No. 9 possesses, and exercises, freedom in several ways. Perhaps primary among these freedoms is shaking off conventions of gender — “This one is for men, that one’s for women.”

A shop that does business on its own adamant terms, Bond No. 9, can afford the inestimable luxury of telling the marketers — whose credo is “Men only buy crap, let’s give them crap” — to go to hell. That it does so means it has the intelligence to do so.

Now, should they gender the mass-market stuff? Sure, the industry’s executives are right on that call. Armani, for example, is like the army, and people who buy its products need marching orders. This is not to say all Armanis are necessarily bad. They’re simply military.

Bond No. 9, conversely, is like Willy Wonka’s factory if it were run by the New Museum: It produces works of art — delights (Little Italy), surprises (Bryant Park), downtown chic (Silver Factory), and things that are wonderfully stunning, like the 2004 launch New Haarlem.

Under the creative direction of Laurice Rahme, the perfumer Maurice Roucel has crafted a rich coffee, burned sugar, lightly spiced scent of an elegant urban midnight, smooth as cream, strong and sleek as the running back Reggie Bush.

This juice runs like a Maserati. Bond has made an astonishing scent, intelligently called it unisex and thrown it out there. Technically perfect — diffusion, persistence, evolution — New Haarlem has no need to leave all masculines in the dust. It is simply a different game.