Frederic Malle Portrait of a Lady

Editions de Parfums Frederic Malle launched in 2000 with an idea borrowed from publishing: the house would act as an editor, commissioning perfumers, giving them unusual freedom and expensive materials, and printing their names on the bottles. Malle's own site describes it as bringing perfumers out of the shadows and treating them as authors. That single decision changed the industry's manners. Twenty-five years later, naming the nose is normal at the luxury end, and it very largely was not before.

Portrait of a Lady, from 2010, is the house's most famous release and the strongest argument for the model. It is by Dominique Ropion, and it is what happens when a perfumer of that calibre is told not to economise. The house describes it as pushing Turkish rose to extravagant proportions over woody tones, amber and incense, and states that four hundred flowers go into a single hundred-millilitre bottle. Malle's own pages also record that it was inducted into the Fragrance Foundation Hall of Fame more than fifteen years after its creation.

The pyramid is deceptively simple as the house lists it: raspberry, rose damascena, patchouli. Fuller listings add clove, cinnamon and blackcurrant at the top, incense, sandalwood and ylang in the middle, and benzoin, musk and ambergris below. On skin the first ten minutes are jammy and almost violent, raspberry and clove over an enormous rose. Then patchouli takes hold, dark and earthy, and incense smokes underneath it. It never becomes pretty. It stays dense, spiced and slightly severe for hours.

This needs cool air. On a Cape winter evening it is magnificent; in heat it becomes overwhelming for everyone in the vicinity, including the wearer.

Performance is the stuff of legend and not exaggerated. Twelve hours on skin is routine, several days on wool, and one spray is a real dose. People buy it and then discover they need to use half of what they expected. It has remained in continuous production since 2010 with no reformulation controversy, which is one of the advantages of a house that never had to reformulate around a mass-market cost base.