Le Perce-Vent Eau de Parfum

Three materials and no pyramid at all: Serge Lutens Le Perce-Vent Eau de Parfum is one of the shortest compositions the house sells, and it is better for being honest about it.

Clary sage has the most to say. It is dry and herbal with a bitter, faintly hay like edge and a thin sweetness underneath, closer to a crushed leaf than to a garden, and it is responsible for the open air, windswept quality of the whole thing.

Musk carries it. Soft, clean and skin like, it spreads the sage out and keeps it near the body rather than letting it project, while white amber sits underneath lending a translucent warmth, resinous but without the sticky weight a conventional amber would bring. The three together smell cool, dry and slightly powdery, and that is the whole of it.

There is no development here and the house has never pretended otherwise. What you have is a single mood held steady for the length of a wear, which suits some people perfectly and will strike others as unfinished, so it is worth trying on skin rather than ordering blind. Expect five or six hours, quiet throughout, sitting close. It is good in warm weather, works for daytime, and reads as unisex. If you want a fragrance you can wear in a small room without anybody mentioning it, this is one of the few at this level that qualifies.

A narrow line by design, and a Paris one, with every bottle in it decided by the same person. Before perfume he worked as a designer, a photographer and an art director, and Shiseido took him on in 1980, publishing a fragrance he had composed a year after that. The square bottle range came much later, in 1999.