Vanille Soleil Wellbeing Fragrant Water Gift Set

Anyone buying for somebody who says they do not wear perfume should look at the Roger & Gallet Vanille Soleil Wellbeing Fragrant Water Gift Set, because a fragrant water is a gentler proposition than a bottle of scent.

The format is the point. Fragrant water carries less oil than an eau de toilette, so it goes on light, fades politely and can be applied over the whole body rather than dabbed carefully at the pulse points. People who find perfume overpowering get on with it, and so do people who work somewhere that frowns on scent. There is no real way to overdo it, which takes the anxiety out of using it at all. The smell itself is warm and simple. Vanilla is the centre of it, kept dry and airy rather than rich, so that it reads as sunlit rather than as something edible. Jasmine gives the opening a white floral brightness, and ylang ylang supplies a creamy depth underneath it, with the slightly fruity, almost banana-like quality that the flower is known for having. Three materials and nothing hidden, which is as it should be in something used this freely.

Dated 2025, it is a summer thing by temperament, good on warm skin and after a bath, and it suits a gift for a mother, a grandmother or a friend who likes to smell of something without smelling of a perfume counter. This is a present that gets used up rather than put on a shelf and quietly forgotten about.

Behind the set is a Paris house with a long history in soap and cologne, trading since 1862. Its soaps were the first to be perfumed right the way through, from 1879, and its bath and body side grew steadily after the 1950s.