Les Eaux d'Un Instant Aromatic Sage Eau de Toilette 100ml

Angel Schlesser Les Eaux d'Un Instant Aromatic Sage Eau de Toilette 100ml is the standard size of a deliberately simple fragrance, and the 100ml bottle makes it an easier first purchase than committing to the larger one. Everything here rests on clary sage. It is the softer, sweeter member of the sage family, herbal and warm with a faint hay like dryness underneath, and it smells more like a dried bunch than like anything growing. Used as the centre of a fragrance it gives a comfortable, slightly old fashioned impression that works equally well on men and women.

Bergamot sits over it for the first twenty minutes, clean and bright with the usual green bitterness, and sandalwood sits beneath, creamy and milky and slow to leave. That is the entire list. Three materials, arranged neatly from top to bottom, with nothing held back for later and nothing buried.

What that buys you is reliability. There is nothing in it to go wrong on the skin, nothing that turns sour in heat, and nothing that will read differently at six in the evening than it did at nine in the morning. The eau de toilette strength keeps it light and close, so it is best applied freely, and the 100ml size is the practical choice for anyone trying the line for the first time.

It reads unisex and belongs to daytime, warm weather and perfectly ordinary occasions rather than special ones. Angel Schlesser is a Spanish label working from a Madrid studio, known across the country's fashion world for restraint, counted among the founders of ACME and present at the Pasarela Cibeles from 1988. Fragrance has been part of what it does from 1999.