Olympéa Gift Set

Ambergris is the material that gives the Rabanne Olympéa Gift Set its particular hold on the skin.

It sits in the base with cashmeran, and between them they produce the effect people describe as a perfume smelling like the person wearing it: ambergris mineral and faintly salty, cashmeran soft and a little furred. Neither is doing anything showy, and both are essential. Above them is the salted vanilla that made the fragrance famous, sweet and briny at once and the reason it does not read as a straightforward sugar scent. The opening is green mandarin, tart rather than juicy, with jasmine for floral width and ginger flower adding a bright and faintly soapy sharpness over the top of it. Six materials and a very careful balance between the sweet half and the salty half.

It performs best in cool weather and after dark, although the salt keeps it from ever becoming oppressive in warmth, and it is worn across a very wide spread of ages. Two sprays is plenty, and it holds longer on clothing than it does on skin.

Boxed as a set, it is a present that needs nothing further done to it at all, and it suits a woman who likes sweetness so long as there is something sharper sitting underneath it. For somebody who prefers a quiet scent it is simply the wrong choice, and no amount of presentation is going to fix that. Anne Flipo, Dominique Ropion and Loc Dong are the perfumers on the credit.

Rabanne is a French house. Its founding designer showed his first collection in 1966, the Spanish group Puig created the perfume division in 1968, and Puig has owned the brand outright since 1987, trading it now under the surname alone.