Agua Fresca de Flores Verbena Fresca y Mandarina 150ml

A three material composition, and all three are named plainly: Alvarez Gómez Agua Fresca de Flores Verbena Fresca y Mandarina 150ml is lemon verbena, mandarin orange and sandalwood, with nothing else hiding behind them. Lemon verbena is the lead and it is a distinctive thing, citric without being a citrus fruit, dry and slightly soapy with a green, stalky quality underneath the brightness. It smells like the leaf crushed in the hand rather than like anything squeezed, and it is the reason this is worth choosing over an ordinary citrus water that would be gone from the skin inside twenty minutes.

Mandarin orange is the sweetness, soft and round with a little peel bitterness behind it, and it fills in the space that the verbena leaves open. Sandalwood underneath is the only warm material, creamy and smooth, and it gives the other two somewhere to settle so the scent does not simply evaporate off the skin within the hour.

There is no development to follow and none is promised. Light compositions of this kind are made to be used generously and used often, which is exactly what the 150ml bottle is there for, and they are far better judged on how pleasant they are to reapply than on how long a single application lasts. Judged that way this one does very well indeed. It reads unisex, it belongs to summer and to daylight, and it is an easy thing to keep at a desk or in a bag. The perfumery behind it is Spanish and family owned, opened at Calle Sevilla 2 in Madrid in 1899 by three young men from León who had come to the city for the aroma trade, and a fourth generation of the family is in charge now.