Carolina Herrera Good Girl

The stiletto came first in most people's memory, and that is a slight injustice to what is inside it. Carolina Herrera launched Good Girl in 2016, twenty-eight years after the Venezuelan-born designer's first fragrance, and it did something the category had not managed for a while: it made a cocoa-and-tuberose gourmand feel like a luxury proposition rather than a dessert. Louise Turner is commonly named as its author, though Carolina Herrera itself prints no such credit. What the house does say is that the bottle takes the form of a sky-high stiletto and that the scent was built around the duality of the modern woman, sweet and dark in the same breath.

Carolina Herrera publishes a deliberately spare pyramid: almond on top, jasmine sambac and tuberose at the heart, tonka bean and cocoa at the base. The fuller reading adds coffee, bergamot and lemon to the opening, orange blossom, Bulgarian rose and orris to the middle, and praline, vanilla, sandalwood, cashmere wood and patchouli underneath. In wear, the almond and coffee arrive first and read almost bitter, which is what stops the whole thing collapsing into sugar. Tuberose then blooms wide and creamy for a couple of hours, and the drydown settles into cocoa, tonka and a dry woody-patchouli spine that lingers on clothing for days.

It is an evening fragrance and it does not pretend otherwise. Cool weather flatters it; a Highveld winter night is close to ideal, and two sprays is genuinely the ceiling in warmer months because the tuberose and cocoa expand fast in heat.

Performance is the reason it sells. Ten hours on skin is normal, sillage is large for the first three, and it survives a wash cycle on a jumper. Good Girl has stayed broadly consistent since launch rather than being visibly thinned, which is unusual for a fragrance this widely distributed, though batch-to-batch variation gets discussed. The line has since grown into a substantial family, including Very Good Girl and Good Girl Blush, so check which one you are buying; the flankers lean brighter and fruitier and are not simply stronger or weaker versions of the original.