Sorbetto Rosso Eau de Toilette 100ml

Escada Sorbetto Rosso Eau de Toilette 100ml was composed by Richard Herpin and released in 2018, and it is built on soft fruit rather than flowers.

Pear opens it with the slightly grainy sweetness that pear has when it is only just ripe, and tangerine sharpens the first few minutes so the sugar does not all arrive at once. The middle is where the work happens. Watermelon is cool and watery rather than sweet, strawberry is jammy, apple gives a crisp bite, and sea salt cuts across all three with a mineral, faintly briny lift that stops the fruit collapsing into syrup. Tiare flower and rose sit behind that, rounding the fruit into something closer to a floral than the opening promises. The close is comfortable and quite short: praline for a sweet, nutty warmth, musk to smooth the joins, and amber to give the fruit something solid to stand on.

As an eau de toilette it is pitched squarely at daytime and at heat. The lighter concentration keeps it from sitting heavily on skin in the sun, which a stronger version of the same idea would do, and the 100ml bottle is sized for the kind of scent people spray freely rather than ration. Expect two or three hours of real presence and a sweet, salted skin scent after that, so a top up in the afternoon is part of how it is meant to be worn. It is pitched at women, it is cheerful rather than clever, and nobody has ever had to think hard about wearing it.

Escada began in Munich in 1978, set up by Margaretha and Wolfgang Ley as a womenswear house with a taste for strong colour and loud print. The fashion company changed hands in 2009, passing to the Mittal family trusts, and the perfumes are made under licence. Limited edition summer bottles have been part of the line since 1993, and this is one of them.