1 Million Eau de Toilette Gift Set

Buying the full size makes sense here, because Rabanne 1 Million Eau de Toilette 100ml is not a fragrance anybody uses sparingly once they have taken to it.

Everything about it is pitched at being noticed. Blood mandarin opens with a sweet, almost jammy citrus, grapefruit sharpens that with bitter peel, and mint gives the first ten minutes a cold edge before the heat arrives. Then cinnamon takes charge, dry and slightly abrasive, with rose behind it adding body rather than floral detail. The base does the lasting work: leather, smooth and worn in rather than animal, amber for sweetness and glow, and Indian patchouli for the earthy weight that keeps it from going flat on skin.

Christophe Raynaud, Michel Girard and Olivier Pescheux are credited with it, and the structure is unusually legible for something this bold. Nothing in it hides, and the sweetness is declared rather than smuggled in, which is why people either take to it immediately or decide within a minute that it is not for them.

In eau de toilette form it sits a little lighter than the heavier concentrations, which in practice means it can be worn to work as well as at night, provided you are honest about how far it carries. Two sprays are plenty and four is a mistake. A bottle of this size lasts a long time at that rate, which is the main argument for it over the smaller ones.

The house behind it is French. Paco Rabanne, a designer, presented his first collection in 1966, and the fragrances came through the Spanish group Puig, which created the perfume division in 1968 before acquiring the brand outright in 1987. The label has since been shortened to Rabanne alone.