French Riviera

Most of Mancera's catalogue points east, towards oud and amber and leather and rose. French Riviera, launched in 2022, points at the house's own doorstep instead. Mancera keeps a boutique in Cannes as well as Paris, and the fragrance reads like an argument that a house built on oriental materials can do a Mediterranean summer just as convincingly.

The brand's own copy is unusually lyrical. Along the coast, where red rocks plunge into a silver sea, the salty air dances with mimosa and the sun-kissed warmth of Monoi. Its three-word summary is better still: solar, saline, vegetal.

It opens sharp and citrus-heavy, lemon and tangerine with a ginger and pepper prickle underneath that stops it becoming another lemonade. Then the marine accord arrives, and it is a good one. Mancera lists sea sprays and iodine notes rather than the generic blue accord that dominates the category, and there is a real mineral, wet-rock quality to it. Tiare and mimosa give a creamy sun-cream floralcy, so the Monoi reference is not decorative, and pine notes and vetiver roots add a dry green edge like scrub above a beach. The base is sea salt, amber and white musk: warm skin after swimming.

For South African wearers this is one of the easier arguments to make. It is built for exactly the conditions the coast delivers, whether that is Clifton in February or Ballito in December, anywhere hot and humid enough that a heavy fragrance becomes unwearable. It works equally well on men and women and it is a daytime scent almost exclusively.

Performance is where it separates itself from the many cheaper marine fragrances it resembles. Mancera builds everything at high concentration, and French Riviera gives eight to ten hours with strong projection through the first two, which is unusual for a salty citrus. Most of them collapse inside three. The eau de parfum comes in two sizes, a 120ml and a 60ml. Be sparing, because the sea-salt and musk base is far more tenacious than the bright opening suggests.