Original Eau de Cologne Gift Set

As a present for somebody who has never owned a bottle, 4711 Original Eau de Cologne Gift Set is about as safe a choice as fragrance allows, because almost nobody actively dislikes it and nearly everybody recognises it. That matters when you are buying for a person whose taste you cannot predict. There is no gamble here of the sort you take with a modern perfume, no heavy base to misjudge, and no question of whether it suits a man or a woman, because it has always been worn by both.

What is inside is a cologne of seven materials. Lemon and orange open it, sharp and sweet in turn, with bergamot's perfumed bitterness running between them. Lavender follows and supplies the clean, soapy, faintly herbal quality that makes the whole thing smell laundered rather than fruity, and rosemary gives a green, resinous lift beside it. The close belongs to neroli and petitgrain. Neroli is the sweet, white flowered one, petitgrain the dry, stemmy, bitter one, and that final contrast is what stops it evaporating into nothing. A cologne concentration is light by design, so it is applied freely and topped up through the day rather than rationed, and a couple of hours of clear presence is the realistic expectation. Explaining that to the recipient is worth doing, since it is the one thing people routinely misunderstand about the format. It presents well, it needs no wrapping beyond what it already comes in, and it does the job for a birthday, a thank you or a first Christmas present to somebody's parents.

Its name is an address. Cologne's buildings were given numbers under the French occupation of 1794, the Muelhens premises came out as 4711, and the firm eventually adopted the figure as its own.