Neroli Wellbeing Fragrant Water Gift Set

Immortelle is the material that keeps the Roger & Gallet Neroli Wellbeing Fragrant Water Gift Set from being just another citrus flower scent. Most orange blossom products stop at the flower. This one opens that way, with neroli giving the green, bitter, slightly waxy brightness that comes from distilling the blossom, and orange blossom following behind it warmer and sweeter, honeyed where the neroli is sharp and green. Then the immortelle arrives and changes the direction. It is a dry straw-like material with a burnt sugar sweetness and a strange savoury edge, and it anchors the flowers to something that lasts past the first twenty minutes.

A small pairing: a 30ml perfumed water and a 30ml hand cream. Three materials only, which is short, and the scent stays recognisably itself from first splash to last trace. Fabrice Pellegrin is credited with the composition. A fragrant water is not a perfume and should not be judged as one: it is lighter, gentler and designed for free use over the body after a bath or during a hot afternoon, which is also why it works for people who react badly to heavier fragrance. Expect to reapply it, and expect that to be part of the pleasure rather than an inconvenience. Orange flower is one of the few materials that improves on the second application.

As a boxed set it makes a calm, uncontroversial present, and it is particularly good for spring and summer giving, when heavier scents are hard to place. This is one of the old Paris perfumers, in business since 1862. It became known for its soap at least as much as for its scent, and from the 1950s onwards it widened into bath and body products of exactly the kind this set belongs to.