Eros Flame

Versace has traded on the same imagery since Gianni Versace founded the house in 1978: the Medusa head, the Greca border, gold on saturated colour. Eros, launched in 2012, gave that imagery a fragrance to match and became one of the most recognisable men's scents of the 2010s. Eros Flame followed in 2018 as its warmer, spicier counterpart, in a red bottle with the same central Medusa and Greca engravings under a gold cap.

Versace credits no perfumer on its own pages. The composition is commonly attributed to Olivier Pescheux of Givaudan, a perfumer whose catalogue includes Paco Rabanne 1 Million and work for Diptyque and Montblanc, and who has since died; obituaries from the trade press list Eros Flame among his best-known creations.

The house's published pyramid is tighter than most independent listings: a chinotto accord and Madagascar black pepper on top, wild rosemary and Pepperwood at the heart, and patchouli, Haitian vetiver and vanilla in the base. Chinotto is the key. It is a bitter Italian citrus, the flavour behind the dark soft drink of the same name, and it opens the fragrance with something sharper and more grown-up than the usual mandarin. Black pepper and rosemary push that into herbal, almost medicinal territory, and geranium and rose in the middle add a slightly metallic floral edge that a lot of wearers register as spice rather than flower. Then the base does the heavy lifting: vanilla and tonka over patchouli, cedar and vetiver, warm and slightly powdery, with oakmoss giving it a faint classical bitterness.

Compared with the original Eros it is less mint, less sweet and considerably more mature. It is an evening fragrance for cool weather; a Cape winter night suits it far better than the coast in February, where the vanilla base can turn syrupy fast.

Performance is very strong. Eight to ten hours with heavy projection in the first three, and it survives on a jacket for days. Two sprays. As a 2018 eau de parfum still in production it has no meaningful reformulation history, and it sits in a large Eros family alongside the original, the flame variants and the parfum concentrations.