The Bomb Gift Set

Carolina Herrera The Bomb Gift Set holds a fragrance of four materials, which puts it among the shortest compositions the house has put its name to.

The set runs to the 80ml Eau de Parfum, a 100ml body lotion and a 10ml spray. Exotic pitaya opens it, the cactus fruit, a material with very little sweetness of its own and a cool, pink, almost watery freshness to it. It makes a strange and rather good opening, because it reads as fruit without any of the usual sugar. Cherry peony follows, soft and faintly sharp at once, and red frangipani sits with it, a tropical flower with a thick, creamy, sun warmed quality that supplies most of the body of the scent. Solar vanilla closes it, and the word solar is doing real work there. This is sweetness handled hot and bright rather than as a dessert, the sort of warmth that smells of skin after a day outdoors, and it carries the two flowers through to the end without ever turning them sticky or heavy.

Four materials and no further stages. What you smell at fifteen minutes is the fragrance entire, and it stays that way for several hours, simply growing closer to the skin as it goes. Anyone wanting a scent that evolves over the course of an evening should look elsewhere. Anyone wanting something immediately likeable, with no learning required, will be well served by it. As a present it works best for warm weather, for holidays and for younger wearers, and it reads as feminine. Give it to someone going somewhere hot rather than to someone spending the winter in an office. A Venezuelan designer working out of New York, Carolina Herrera showed her first collection in 1981 and began putting out perfume in 1988, under a licence held by the Spanish group Puig. Puig bought the clothing side of the business in 1995.