Icon Pour Homme Eau de Parfum Gift Set

Dsquared2 Icon Pour Homme Eau de Parfum Gift Set is an easy present for a man who likes clean, herbal fragrance and does not want to smell sweet.

The scent inside opens on ginger, used dry and spicy rather than candied, with a fizz to it that lasts a few minutes before the herbs take over. Lavender arrives next with its familiar clean camphor edge, geranium gives a green, flowery crispness, and clary sage adds a dry, hay like bitterness. Tulip is the unexpected one, cool and lightly green, and it softens the middle without turning it floral in any obvious way. Cedarwood and patchouli finish the job, dry pale wood against dark earth.

Seven materials is a short list, and this is a straightforward fragrance rather than a puzzle. That is a virtue in a gift: there is nothing here to acquire a taste for. Expect five or six hours, with a moderate presence early on and a dry cedarwood and patchouli finish later.

For the person buying it, the practical appeal is a boxed presentation that needs no wrapping and reads as more generous than a single bottle. For the person receiving it, it is a daytime fragrance for the office, for mild weather and for the kind of man who has been wearing the same herbal style for years and is not about to change. Nothing in the box needs explaining, which is the best thing you can say about a gift of fragrance.

The label was founded in 1995 by the Canadian born twins Dean and Dan Caten, who had moved to Milan in 1992, and made its name with menswear built on denim, sportswear and a flair for the dramatic. Fragrance for the name is handled by an outside licensee.