Acqua di Gio

Few fragrances have reshaped a category as completely as Acqua di Giò did in 1996. Armani built it around the Mediterranean at Pantelleria, the volcanic island where Giorgio Armani kept a house, and released it into a market still dominated by heavy powerhouse scents. Within a few years the aquatic accord it popularised had been copied into every price bracket on earth. No perfumer credit is printed on Armani's own product pages. The name the trade attaches to it is Alberto Morillas, one of the most prolific noses of the modern era, and that attribution has never been confirmed by the house.

Armani's current listing opens with Calabrian bergamot, neroli and green tangerine, gives the body as rosemary, persimmon and Indonesian patchouli, and reduces the whole thing to three key materials: marine, bergamot, cedarwood. Generally documented breakdowns run wider: lime, lemon, bergamot and mandarin over a marine heart built on calone, with jasmine, freesia, hyacinth and rosemary softening it, and white musk, cedar, oakmoss, patchouli and amber underneath. In wear it is bright, saline and slightly soapy, with a green herbal thread and a clean musky-woody base that became the reference point for what fresh means in men's fragrance.

It is worth saying plainly that a fragrance nearly thirty years old has been reformulated more than once, largely because of restrictions on materials such as oakmoss, and current bottles read cleaner and thinner than the earliest ones did. It remains, even so, the correct answer to a hot day. On a humid Durban morning or a Highveld summer afternoon it does something very few fragrances manage, which is to feel like relief.

Performance is the long-standing criticism, and it is fair. Four to six hours on skin is realistic. The opening does nearly all the projecting; everything after it sits against the body. Armani has answered this with a family of stronger relatives listed alongside it, including Profondo, Acqua di Giò Parfum, Elixir and an Eau de Parfum Intense. If you love the original but want it to last, one of those is the fix rather than more sprays of this one.