Maison Francis Kurkdjian Baccarat Rouge 540

Francis Kurkdjian composed Le Male at twenty-five, spent a decade as one of the most in-demand perfumers in the industry, and co-founded his own house in Paris in 2009 with Marc Chaya. Baccarat Rouge 540 is the fragrance that made that house famous, and its origin is not a marketing conceit. Maison Francis Kurkdjian states it was born from the encounter between the house and the crystal maker Baccarat, whose 250th anniversary the fragrance marked; the number refers to the temperature at which Baccarat's celebrated red crystal is produced. It began as a limited crystal-flacon commission before the eau de parfum reached the wider market in 2015, with an extrait following later.

Kurkdjian's stated aim was to translate the alchemy of crystal-making into scent, and the composition is startlingly simple for something so distinctive. The house names jasmine and saffron at the top, an accord evoking ambergris and dry woody tones at the heart, and ethyl maltol with gourmand facets at the base. Saffron is the character note: leathery, faintly medicinal, slightly metallic. The jasmine is abstract rather than floral. And the ethyl maltol is what everyone actually recognises, a burnt-sugar sweetness that reads to most people as candyfloss, jam or hot caramel depending on the skin. Held together by ambery woods, the result is airy and dense at once, which is exactly the crystal metaphor working.

It divides opinion sharply, and its enormous rating count with a middling average score reflects that honestly. Wear it on a warm Pretoria evening and it becomes a signal; wear it in a meeting room and you may find people commenting on it before you have sat down.

Performance is exceptional and slightly unusual. It projects hard for the first hour, then settles into a mode where you stop smelling it entirely but others report it hours later, and it clings to fabric for days. Two sprays is genuinely enough. Two cautions: because of its fame it is among the most counterfeited and most imitated fragrances in existence, so buy from a source you trust, and be aware the extrait de parfum is a noticeably different, denser interpretation rather than simply a stronger one.