For Her Eau de Toilette Gift Set

Narciso Rodriguez For Her Eau de Toilette Gift Set is built for the person doing the buying rather than the person doing the wearing, which is exactly what you want when a birthday has arrived faster than expected.

The scent inside is one of the most recognisable things the house has put its name to. Osmanthus leads, and it is a flower that refuses to behave like one: dry, faintly tannic, closer to soft fruit and velvet than to petals. Orange blossom is set against it, white and clean with a trace of bitterness, and that is what stops the fruit quality turning into a sweet. Everything then settles into musk, which here is the subject of the fragrance rather than the backdrop to it, warm and close and more like skin than like perfume. Amber adds a resinous glow beneath it, patchouli brings a damp earthiness, and between them they give the final hours some shadow instead of letting the whole thing go soft.

At eau de toilette strength the composition is handled lightly. It stays near the skin, it can be applied with a generous hand without becoming overbearing, and it holds through a working day rather than through a weekend. That makes it straightforward in offices, in warm weather and in the sort of company where a heavy fragrance becomes hard work. Christine Nagel and Francis Kurkdjian are credited with the composition.

Bought as a set it arrives presented and ready to hand over, which takes care of the wrapping too. It is aimed at women, it wears comfortably across most of the year, and liked widely enough that you are unlikely to get it wrong. If the recipient turns out to love it, the scent is easy enough to find again in other formats.

Narciso Rodriguez started his American fashion label in 1997. He was raised in Newark by Cuban immigrant parents and studied at Parsons before learning the business under Donna Karan at Anne Klein and afterwards at Calvin Klein. He was design director of womenswear at Loewe from 1997 until 2001, the year he opened his own atelier in New York. The fragrances are produced under licence by Beaute Prestige International.