Hermès Eau d'Orange Verte

Hermès sold saddles, silk and leather for well over a century before it committed to perfume, and this is the cologne that began the commitment. The house is unusually plain about the history on its own product page: the first Hermès cologne was created by Françoise Caron in 1979 and sold simply as Eau de cologne Hermès, becoming Eau d'orange verte only in 1997. Renaming a scent after its own central idea, almost twenty years in, tells you how settled Hermès had become about what it had made — a green orange rather than a sweet one.

Hermès lists the main raw materials as orange, mint and moss, and the composition really is close to that skeletal. It opens on orange peel that seems scraped rather than squeezed, bitter and cold, with mint sitting beside the citrus rather than under it; the effect is less minty than simply cooler, the way a leaf smells when you crush it in shade. Moss gives the whole thing a damp, faintly earthy floor that stops the citrus evaporating into nothing. There is no sugar anywhere in it and no wood pushing forward. The drydown is a soft green shadow of the opening rather than a different fragrance arriving late.

It suits mornings and heat far better than evenings and cold. On the Highveld in January, when the sun is up by six and the afternoon storm has not arrived yet, a cologne built like this earns its keep in a way a heavy amber never will. It reads as clean without reading as soap, and it is genuinely for anyone; Hermès has never marketed it otherwise.

Be realistic about longevity. Eau de cologne is the lightest of the traditional concentrations and this behaves accordingly: three to four hours of real presence, close to the skin after the first, and best applied generously and often. Hermès sells a matching shower gel and body lotion for precisely that reason. A cologne this long-lived has also been adjusted over the decades as regulations and raw materials changed, so a bottle bought today will not be identical to one from the 1980s. It will be recognisably the same idea, which is more than most forty-year-old fragrances can say.