Cologne Twist Gift Set

Presents go wrong when they demand something of the person opening them, and Roger & Gallet Cologne Twist Gift Set demands nothing at all.

Inside are the 100ml Eau de Cologne and a 100g soap. The fragrance at the centre of it is short and bright. Lemon opens it alone, sharp and rindy with no sweetening at all. Sage, elemi and basil make up the rest: sage dry and herbal with a cool camphorous edge, elemi resinous and clean, basil green with a quiet aniseed lift. Four materials, no base, and a composition that is meant to refresh rather than to announce. The whole thing reads as clean rather than as perfumed, which is the oldest trick in cologne and still the most useful.

That makes it an unusually safe gift. A short citrus cologne is close to universally acceptable. It will not clash with anything the recipient already wears, it will not overwhelm a room, and it does not require anybody to develop a taste for it. It suits men and women equally and it is as appropriate for somebody in their twenties as for somebody in their seventies. It is also impossible to wear wrongly, in the sense that too much of it simply fades faster.

The set is the easy way to buy it. It arrives ready to hand over, and the Cologne Twist scent was composed by Karine Dubreuil-Sereni, so there is a real perfumer's name behind what looks at first glance like a simple thing. Boxed, it needs neither wrapping nor explanation on the day it is handed over.

The house dates from 1862 in Paris, where a pair of brothers in law bought a cologne business founded in 1806 and built a perfumery and soap company around it. When it made a round soap in 1879, that bar was the first to carry fragrance through its whole depth rather than just on the outside.