Fleur de Figuier Wellbeing Fragrant Water Gift Set

For anyone who finds most scented gifts too sweet, the Roger & Gallet Fleur de Figuier Wellbeing Fragrant Water Gift Set is the useful exception.

The box holds a 30ml perfumed water and a 30ml hand cream. It is built around fig, and specifically around the green part of fig rather than the sugary part. The material here carries the smell of leaf and sap alongside the fruit, slightly milky, a little bitter, cool rather than warm, and nothing at all like the fig of a scented candle. Grapefruit sits over it in the opening minutes with a bright, pithy sharpness, and musk lies underneath it all, soft and quiet, giving the scent something to hold onto on the skin. The composition stops at those three materials. It is short, deliberately so, and the pleasure of it is in the clarity rather than in any development. You smell fig, you go on smelling fig, and the grapefruit and musk simply decide how bright or how soft that fig is at any given hour. For a scent this simple it is remarkably hard to tire of.

Fragrant water is the lightest of the formats the house makes, closer to a splash than to a perfume, which means it can be used liberally on a hot day and reapplied through the afternoon without anyone minding. The set arrives boxed, so it suits a thank you present or a summer gift where something heavier would sit unused on a shelf until it turned. It is light enough to be worn by somebody who shares a small bathroom with other people.

The firm is one of the older names in French perfumery. It took over a cologne business that had been established back in 1806, and from 1932 onwards it has worked out of premises on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore.