Cool Water Woman Eau de Toilette 100ml

Watermelon is the material that made Davidoff Cool Water Woman Eau de Toilette 100ml recognisable in 1996, and it still carries the fragrance now.

Watermelon here is cool and watery rather than sweet, closer to the pale flesh beside the rind than to the red middle, and pineapple beside it adds a sharp edge that keeps the opening from turning bland. The pair give the first ten minutes a juiciness that was genuinely new in a women's fragrance at the time and has been copied often since.

Lily of the valley holds the middle on its own, green and dewy, more like a stem than a petal, and it is the material that shifts the fragrance from fruit towards something cleaner. Blackcurrant finishes underneath, tart and faintly green, so the end is not warm at all but holds the same cool line as the beginning.

That is four materials and the whole of it. A short composition, and one that does not try to develop: what you get at ten minutes is what you get at three hours, growing quieter. As an eau de toilette expect four hours or so with moderate projection early on. Hot weather and daylight suit it, it is sold to women, and the 100ml bottle is the practical size for something you will wear through a summer. It is also one of the easiest fragrances to buy for somebody else, because almost nobody actively dislikes it.

Davidoff grew out of a tobacconist's trading in Geneva from 1911 and a cigar business run by Zino Davidoff, with fragrance licensed to a separate company. The men's Cool Water of 1988 is the scent the name rests on, and this women's counterpart from 1996 is the second pillar of the same range.