Encre Noire Eau de Toilette 100ml

Four materials are all there is to Lalique Encre Noire Eau de Toilette 100ml, and it has become one of the most recommended bottles in its price bracket on the strength of just one of them.

That one is vetiver. It is the rooty, bitter, earth covered material at the heart of this, and the version used here is dark rather than citrusy, with a damp, mineral quality like the smell of a cellar floor after rain. Cypress stands over it, green and resinous and quite severe, and the pairing is what makes people call this perfume gloomy, usually as a compliment. Underneath, cashmeran does something clever: it is warm, slightly musky and velvety, and it keeps the vetiver from reading as purely cold. Musk rounds the whole thing off and holds it to the skin.

Four materials behave like four materials. There is no second act here and nothing arrives in hour three to change your mind, which is worth knowing before you buy. What you smell at fifteen minutes is the fragrance, only progressively softer. For a toilette it lasts unusually well, six hours or more on skin and longer on clothes, because vetiver and cashmeran are both tenacious. Projection is moderate after the first half hour, so it works in an office rather than across a restaurant. It suits autumn and winter, it suits men, and it suits people who find most mainstream fragrance too sweet by half. Nathalie Lorson composed it in 2006.

Lalique has been in business since 1888, when Rene Lalique moved from jewellery into glass and built a reputation on Art Nouveau work. Designing perfume bottles for other houses came in 1907 with a Coty commission, and the company waited until 1992 to sell fragrance under its own name.