Agua de Rosas Frescas Eau de Toilette 150ml

Aire de Sevilla Agua de Rosas Frescas Eau de Toilette 150ml is built for warm weather and for using freely, which the size of the bottle makes obvious enough before you have opened it.

The opening is a citrus and fruit mix rather than a single note. Mandarin orange is the sweetest of them, lemon the sharpest, bergamot the cleanest and driest, and pineapple sits across all three adding a tart tropical lift that keeps the citrus from reading as simple kitchen brightness. It is generous and it is loud for about ten minutes before it begins to settle.

Then the flowers arrive. Geranium is the interesting one, green and slightly metallic with a rosy edge to it, and it bridges straight into the rose itself, which here is the cool transparent sort rather than anything jammy or heavy. Neroli brings its honeyed orange flower sweetness along with a soapy cleanliness, and lily of the valley adds a watery, dewy green that lifts the whole heart. That is as far as the composition goes; we hold no base for it, and in wear it behaves accordingly, fading away rather than turning into something different.

As an eau de toilette it is light, and the point of a bottle this size is that you can spray with both hands and not think about the cost. Summer, daytime, straight after a shower, hot afternoons when anything heavier becomes hard work. It reads as feminine and as deliberately uncomplicated, and it is a sensible thing to keep by the door in July. Aire de Sevilla comes from Instituto Espanol, a Spanish perfumery and cosmetics manufacturer founded in 1903 and still in family hands three generations on. It produces at Hinojos in Huelva province and describes itself as entirely Andalusian, with a range running from colognes through shower gels, creams, deodorants and oils.