Hero Gift Set

The Burberry Hero Gift Set takes one of the more distinctive men's fragrances of recent years and presents it as a present, which is a useful thing when the scent itself is not the obvious crowd pleaser.

The set is the 100ml Eau de Parfum with a 10ml spray to carry. What we hold for it are four materials, all listed in the heart, and they tell you plainly what kind of thing this is. Frankincense is the lead, dry and resinous with a cool, faintly bitter clarity to it, and it is the material that gives the fragrance its churchlike seriousness. Benzoin sits beneath it, thick and balsamic and sweet in the way warmed resin is sweet, rounding off the frankincense before it turns austere. Cedarwood brings a dry, sharpened, pencil shaving quality. Pine supplies the green: sappy, cold, outdoor, and far more literal than most fragrances dare to be.

Aurélien Guichard composed it, and the composition is notably direct. There is no fruit in it, no sweetness beyond the benzoin, and no attempt to be pleasant on first spray. It grows on people instead. The absence of fruit is a large part of why it feels expensive.

It is best given to someone whose taste you know, or to someone who has already said they like resin and smoke in a fragrance. It suits autumn and winter, and it reads male without being aggressive about it. Boxed as a set, so it presents well without wrapping. Anyone expecting the polite designer formula will be caught out by it, and that is the reason to buy this rather than something safer. It has the advantage of being instantly recognisable, so whoever opens it will know what it is.

Burberry has been a British house since 1856, built on outerwear and on the check that became its signature, and it moved to larger premises in Haymarket in London in 1913. The fragrances have always been made under licence by others, and the licence has sat with Coty since 2017.