Fusion D'Issey Extrême Eau de Toilette

Nathalie Lorson composed Fusion D'Issey Extrême Eau de Toilette for Issey Miyake, and the interest in it lies in a pairing most houses would not attempt: coconut and lavender in the same heart.

The opening is spice and citrus, handled lightly. Cardamom is cool, green and slightly resinous rather than hot, and bergamot beside it supplies a clean bitterness that opens the composition out. It lasts about ten minutes and it is a deliberately understated way in.

Then the middle does something strange and it works. Coconut here is dry and creamy rather than sweet, closer to the flesh than to anything bottled for the beach. Lavender beside it is herbal, clean and faintly camphorous, and mint sharpens both with a cold lift. The coconut should fight the lavender and instead it rounds it off, so the result is creamy and bracing at once, which is a genuinely unusual thing to smell. Sandalwood and patchouli close it. Sandalwood is creamy and dry, which picks up the coconut from above, and patchouli is earthy and faintly damp, giving the drydown a weight the first two stages never suggested. The last hours are the most conventional part of the fragrance and also the most comfortable.

Seven materials and three clearly separated stages. As an eau de toilette it is bright early and close later, with longevity that is good rather than exceptional, so reapplication at the end of the day is reasonable. It is aimed at men, works through warm weather and into autumn, and suits daytime and early evening equally.

The perfume arm belongs to a design company from Japan. It grew out of Miyake Design Studio, set up in 1970, with incorporation in 1971 and a first store opening in Tokyo in 1974. Shibuya holds the head office. Garments cut and pleated in experimental ways made the reputation, and scent joined the business in March 1992.