Bad Boy Cobalt Eau de Parfum Gift Set

If you collect fragrance rather than simply wear it, the truffle accord in the Carolina Herrera Bad Boy Cobalt Eau de Parfum Gift Set is the reason to pay attention to this one. It is a savoury and earthy material with a sweetness buried somewhere inside it, and finding it in the base of a mainstream men's scent is genuinely rare. Vetiver sits alongside, dry and rooty with a bitter green edge, and the two of them give the fragrance a floor that smells of soil rather than of sugar. Above, black plum brings a dark winey fruit sweetness and geranium cuts across it sharp and metallic. The opening is the only conventional part of it: pink pepper, prickly and bright, with clean lavender just behind.

Six materials, and the composition is a good deal more interesting than its packaging ever lets on. Eau de parfum strength is the right choice for something this dark. Nine hours of wear is normal, presence is strong for the first two, and restraint with the atomiser is not optional. Cold weather and nights out, and very little else. It is a men's fragrance, and it suits somebody who would rather be asked what he is wearing than blend quietly into a room. The set is the format to buy when it is a present, since it arrives boxed and needs nothing from you, and it is also the easier way to give somebody a fragrance this unusual: the packaging is reassuring even if the contents are not. Domitille Michalon Bertier is the perfumer behind it.

Clothes came first for this house: the designer's debut collection appeared in New York in 1981. Its perfumes have been produced under a licence held by Puig in Spain since 1988.