LoveMe Onyx Parfum Gift Set

Tous LoveMe Onyx Parfum Gift Set is built on a short heart and a long base, and once you notice that the whole thing makes more sense. There are only two materials in the middle. Orchid gives a creamy, slightly fleshy sweetness and heliotrope a dry powderiness, and together they last a matter of minutes rather than hours. Above them, the opening is far more distinctive: hazelnut, toasted and faintly rich, which is a rare thing to lead a fragrance with, set against grapefruit for bitterness and peony for a cool, papery floral snap. Below them, three materials do nearly all the work of the wearing. Vanilla is the warmth, sandalwood the dry and creamy smoothness, and vetiver the earthy, rooty bitterness that keeps the other two from becoming cloying. Eight materials, unevenly distributed, and the result is a fragrance with a striking first impression and a very stable second half.

Boxed as a gift set, it is the sort of thing to give in October or November, when warm fragrance starts making sense again. It reads feminine, it suits evenings, and it is forgiving if the recipient is not a confident wearer: there is nothing sharp in the base to go wrong. The one thing to check first is the opening, because hazelnut divides people more sharply than any flower would, and it is the first thing anybody will smell. If that is welcome, the rest looks after itself.

Tous is based in Manresa, a Catalan town, and has been since it started. The business dates itself to 1920, when it repaired watches rather than selling jewellery, and the people who built it were Salvador Tous Blavi and Teresa Ponsa. The bear is its signature, and fragrance did not appear until 2000.