Maison Francis Kurkdjian Aqua Universalis

Francis Kurkdjian was twenty-five when he composed Le Male for Jean Paul Gaultier in 1995, and he spent the following fourteen years working for other people's houses before opening his own in Paris in 2009 with the businessman Marc Chaya. Aqua Universalis belongs to that first year, and it set the register the maison has traded on ever since: extremely clean, extremely precise, and closer to a well-made material than to a story. LVMH took a majority stake in the house in 2017, and Kurkdjian has since also taken the perfumer's post at Dior, but Aqua Universalis remains the bottle most people meet the maison through.

The house keeps its note list short and does not arrange it as a pyramid. Maison Francis Kurkdjian describes it as releasing notes of bergamot, citron, white flowers and a subtle scent of light and musky wood, and calls it a fragrance for everyone and everything, with the same bright scent for men and for women. That is an accurate description. The opening is a cold, faintly bitter citrus, more citron peel than lemon juice, with none of the sugar most fresh fragrances use to soften a start. The white flowers underneath are handled with restraint, a suggestion of lily and orange blossom rather than a bouquet, and what remains after an hour is the thing it is actually famous for: a soft, slightly sweet white musk over pale wood that smells like sunlight on laundry.

It is the definition of a clean scent, and it is best in heat. A Highveld summer morning is precisely its weather, and very few fragrances stay this inoffensive in a warm car. It is also office-appropriate to the point of being invisible to anyone standing more than a metre away, which some people want and others resent.

That last point is the honest caveat. The eau de toilette is deliberately transparent: three to five hours on most skin, hugging close once the opening has gone. If you want the same idea with more force, the house offers Aqua Universalis Cologne Forte in eau de parfum, and there are several other Aqua compositions in the range that are not interchangeable with this one.