Tiffany Sheer Eau de Toilette

Tiffany Sheer Eau de Toilette is a warm weather scent and a short one, six materials with nothing hidden among them, made for the kind of heat in which bigger perfumes become hard work.

Mandarin leaf starts it, green and bitter rather than juicy, the leaf and not the fruit, and blackcurrant sits underneath with a tart, slightly sharp berry quality. Rose and ylang ylang make the middle, the rose dewy and quite simple, the ylang ylang bringing a soft, custard like sweetness and a creamy thickness that keeps the pair from reading thin.

Then it closes without ceremony. Musk and iris finish it, the musk clean and skin like, the iris cool, dry and faintly powdery, and that is genuinely the whole second half. There is no long evolution to follow and no surprise waiting at hour four, which some people much prefer and others will find plain, so it is worth knowing before you buy.

Being an eau de toilette it sits light and stays near the skin. Four to six hours is realistic, less than that in real heat, and it behaves like the sort of bottle you keep in a bag and refresh rather than one you apply once and forget. Daytime, offices, spring and summer. It reads feminine without turning sweet, and that restraint is the point of it.

The name dates to 1837 and a shop at 259 Broadway, where the original business sold stationery and fancy goods before moving into silver and jewellery, issued its first Blue Book in 1845 and set the pattern for the modern solitaire engagement ring in 1886. Its perfumes are made under licence by a separate company, an arrangement that ran for decades before a new licence was signed with Coty in January 2016.