Radiante Eau de Parfum

A cotton note is an unusual thing to build a fragrance around, and Narciso Rodriguez Radiante Eau de Parfum does exactly that. Cotton in perfumery is not a smell lifted from a plant so much as an impression: clean, soft, faintly sweet and slightly dry, the idea of fresh fabric rather than any flower or fruit. Here it sets the register for everything else. Orange blossom gives it a white petal lift, bright and gently sweet without ever turning rich, while clove cuts in with a warm, dry spice that is the one genuinely unexpected move in the composition. A single spice against something this clean does more work than a whole tier of them would.

Underneath, vetiver and cedarwood provide the structure, one rooty and a little scorched, the other dry and straight edged, and musk ties the whole thing to the skin. Six materials in all, which makes this a short composition by design. There is no long development to follow and very little that smells different at hour four to hour one. What you get instead is consistency, which is the point of a scent like this. At eau de parfum strength it has enough oil to last without needing to be loud, and it stays comparatively close. That makes it a daytime and working week proposition, comfortable in warm weather where heavier things become hard going, and easy to wear around people who would rather not smell your perfume before they see you.

Narciso Rodriguez has been an American fashion house since 1997. Its founder was raised in Newark by Cuban immigrant parents, trained at Parsons, worked for Donna Karan at Anne Klein and later at Calvin Klein, led womenswear at Loewe, and opened a New York atelier in 2001. Beaute Prestige International makes the fragrances under licence.