Apparently, it pays to write a rave review in The New York Times.

The New York Post reports:

The New York Times’s perfume critic, Chandler Burr, admits accepting free samples of a French fragrance to which he’d given a 5-star writeup last year – and then giving the perfume to patrons of a $200-a-head dinner he hosted this month.
Burr, author of the best-selling book, “The Emperor of Scent,” hosted a six-course “Scent Dinner” – pairing various fragrance scents with gourmet entrees – beginning with one on Aug. 6 at the Carlyle, with more to follow at other Rosewood Hotel properties around the country.
At the end of the meal, Burr’s diners received swag bags that included the fragrance he’d been given without charge, which led one fuming journo to write us: “Has Mr. Burr recused himself from ever critiquing those fragrances in the Times? …. As a journalist, it outrages me that Mr. Burr is permitted to prostitute himself and the New York Times in this manner.”

In his maximum five-star review in the Times’s style magazine, T, last December 3, Burr calling Sel de Vetiver “riveting… as unearthly as a god born in the cold under an eerily bright star.”

He later got the free samples.