Acqua di Giò Profondo

Twenty-four years after the original Acqua di Giò rewrote the rules for fresh masculine fragrance, Armani asked what would happen if the same idea went underwater. Profondo, released in 2020 and commonly attributed to Alberto Morillas, is not a stronger Acqua di Giò. It is a darker, colder, more mineral one, and the difference registers within seconds. Armani describes it as blending salty marine notes with cypress, lavender and rosemary, rounded out with patchouli and musk to explore a new dimension, the deep sea.

The opening is marine in a way the 1996 fragrance never was: sea notes and an aquatic material Armani calls Aquozone, alongside bergamot and green mandarin, giving a cold saline brightness rather than a sunny one. The heart is the genuinely interesting part. Rosemary and lavender bring a dry aromatic bitterness, cypress adds a resinous evergreen shadow, and mastic contributes a green, slightly turpentine-like edge that reads as wet stone. Underneath, mineral notes, musk, patchouli and amber build a base that is smooth and grey rather than warm. The whole thing smells like rock pools at dusk rather than a beach at noon.

It is the more versatile of the two in practice. It works through a Cape winter as easily as through Highveld heat, and it is one of very few aquatic fragrances that reads formal enough for evening. It has also developed a considerable following as an everyday office scent, precisely because it manages to be inoffensive without being boring, and because it does not smell like the same fragrance everyone wore at school.

Performance is a substantial improvement on the original. Ten hours is not unusual, eight is routine, and the mineral musky base stays legible right through the day; the opening three hours are the loud ones. Armani sells it in a refillable bottle alongside a Profondo Parfum concentration, so the idea has been extended rather than replaced. If you have tried the original Acqua di Giò and found it too light or too sweetly citric, this is the version to test first, because it is a genuinely different fragrance wearing a familiar name.