Goddess Intense Eau de Parfum

An intense version normally means a heavier hand with the same materials rather than new ones, and that is exactly what Burberry Goddess Intense Eau de Parfum offers: vanilla and lavender, nothing added, simply more of it.

The vanilla is the first thing you notice and the last. Here it reads dense and dark, closer to the resin of the bean than to anything whipped, with a slightly smoky sweetness that sits heavily rather than brightly. Lavender is set against it, cool and aromatic and faintly medicinal, and at this concentration it holds on longer than you might expect, keeping a dry herbal thread running through the sweetness for the first couple of hours. Two materials is a short composition by any measure, and this does not pretend to unfold. What it does instead is persist. Expect strong projection early, then hours of a close, warm, sweet trail, and a mark left on a scarf or a jumper that will still be there tomorrow. One spray is the right starting dose and two is generous. The lack of a third material is not a flaw at this concentration so much as a decision: there is nothing in the way of the sweetness, and nothing to muddy it either.

Amandine Clerc-Marie is the perfumer. Cold weather and evenings are where this makes most sense; in heat the sweetness becomes hard work, and in a small shared office it will be noticed whether or not you want it to be. Anyone who liked the standard version but wished it lasted longer, or sat closer to the skin for less time, is the obvious buyer here. This is a luxury fashion house from Britain, trading since 1856, with outerwear at the centre of its reputation and the trench at the centre of that. Its perfumes have always been somebody else's to manufacture, and that somebody is Coty.