Acqua di Gio

Few fragrances have shaped a decade the way this one did. Launched in 1996, Acqua di Giò took the aquatic idea that had been circulating since the late eighties and made it warm, wearable and enormously commercial, and for the twenty years that followed a great deal of men's perfumery was essentially a response to it. Armani's own framing has not changed: a fresh and relaxed men's fragrance that captures the pure freshness and warmth of the Mediterranean Sea.

The house files it under fresh aquatics and reduces the whole composition to three materials on the label. Its longer copy describes a splash of sea notes carrying Calabrian bergamot, neroli and green tangerine, and says those light aquatic nuances go on to blend with rosemary, persimmon and Indonesian patchouli. What that translates to on skin is a bright, salt-tinged citrus opening, a herbal middle where rosemary and jasmine keep it from being merely clean, and a soft musky slightly woody finish. The marine effect comes from a family of aroma chemicals developed in the eighties whose smell is closer to melon rind and sea air than to actual seawater.

No nose is named anywhere on Armani's own site. Alberto Morillas is the perfumer the trade has always attached to it, and that remains an attribution rather than a confirmed credit. Like most fragrances of its age it has been adjusted over the decades to keep pace with changing ingredient regulations, so a bottle bought today does not smell identical to one from 1996. That is worth knowing, and it is true of every classic still in production.

It remains, genuinely, one of the best hot-weather fragrances ever made. On a Highveld summer day it performs precisely the job it was engineered for, while in cold weather it can read thin. It is safe in the most useful sense of that word: appropriate at work, at a wedding and on a Saturday afternoon, and legible to almost everybody.

Performance is the honest weak point. Volatile citrus and marine materials in an eau de toilette behave exactly as you would expect, and five to six hours with moderate projection is realistic. Armani sells heavier interpretations of the same idea for those who want more, but the original eau de toilette is the one that changed things.