For Her Eau de Toilette Gift Set

The odd thing about Narciso Rodriguez For Her Eau de Toilette Gift Set is that the material it is built on is one most houses hide at the bottom of a formula.

Musk is usually a base, a way of making everything above it last longer. Here it is the whole proposition: soft, warm, clean, faintly powdery, and placed where a flower would normally be. The result smells less like a perfume than like a person, which is why it inspires real loyalty in some wearers while others say it smells of nothing in particular.

The rest is arranged around that. Osmanthus opens with a dry, slightly bitter quality that is closer to fruit and worn cloth than to a bloom. Orange blossom lifts it with clean white petals and a thin green edge. Amber and patchouli finish underneath, resin on one side and damp earth on the other, giving the drydown something to hold on to. None of the five materials is working especially hard, and the restraint is deliberate rather than cheap.

At toilette strength the whole thing stays modest. A working day of wear, close to the skin, with a faint trace left behind on clothes. That suits daytime, warm weather and shared spaces, and it makes the fragrance forgiving if the person wearing it is heavy handed with a bottle. Christine Nagel and Francis Kurkdjian are named on the composition, and this boxed version is the one bought as a present.

Narciso Rodriguez launched his American fashion house in 1997. Brought up in Newark by Cuban immigrant parents, he trained at Parsons, worked under Donna Karan at Anne Klein and then at Calvin Klein, led womenswear at Loewe for four years, and opened his own New York atelier in 2001.