Men Eau de Parfum

Brioni Men Eau de Parfum is cut the way the house cuts a suit: nothing surplus, nothing loud, and everything in proportion to everything else.

Pink pepper and green apple open it, and the green apple is the surprise. It is crisp and tart rather than sweet, closer to the skin of the fruit than to the flesh, and pink pepper gives it a rosy sparkle alongside. The opening lasts a quarter of an hour at most before the composition settles into its real character.

Violet and ambroxan make the middle, and this is the part that gives the scent its particular polish. Violet is powdery, cool and a little green, a flower that reads as formal rather than pretty, while ambroxan underneath it is warm, mineral and radiant, the material modern perfumery uses to make a composition carry across a room without shouting. Together they are discreet and expensive smelling, and they last for hours.

Cedarwood, tonka bean and musk close it, dry and soft in turn, with tonka adding a faint sweetness that stops the finish from turning austere. At eau de parfum strength it holds on for a long working day while staying close to the wearer, which is the behaviour a scent of this kind needs: present at a handshake, invisible across a table.

It is made for business, for formal occasions and for a man who wants to be dressed rather than noticed. Autumn, winter and spring suit it better than high summer, and it reads masculine throughout. Brioni is an Italian tailoring house founded in Rome in 1945 by the tailor Nazareno Fonticoli and Gaetano Savini, whose first shop stood on Via Barberini. It built its name on bespoke and made to measure suiting and on dressing Hollywood, John Wayne among the earliest, and it has belonged to Kering since 2011. The fragrances are not produced by the tailors but by an outside perfume company under licence.