Nina Ricci Nina

Nina Ricci says on its own pages that the house was founded in Paris in 1932 by Robert Ricci as a gift for his mother, the couturiere whose name it carries. Its defining fragrance came in 1948: L'Air du Temps, which the house describes as embodying the optimism of the post-war era, and which put a Lalique dove on top of a bottle and made it one of the most recognisable objects in perfumery. That is the shadow every later Nina Ricci release works in.

Nina, from 2006, escaped it by being unapologetically playful. The composition is credited to master perfumer Olivier Cresp, who had already composed Mugler Angel and would later sign Dolce&Gabbana Devotion, and the concept is straightforward: the temptation of forbidden fruit, in a bottle shaped like a bright red apple with a silver leaf. Worth noting for collectors that the house had used the name Nina once before, in the 1980s, for an entirely different composition; the apple bottle is the one everyone means.

The house lists lemon and lime at the top, gardenia and toffee apple at the heart, and cedarwood with white musk in the base. Fuller listings add Granny Smith apple, praline, peony and datura in the middle. It opens genuinely citric and green-sour, and the lime is what stops the whole thing from being cloying. The centre is the toffee apple accord, and it is done well: sweet, waxy, slightly caramelised, more toffee-apple-at-a-fair than confectionery counter. Underneath, cedar and clean musk keep it light and give it a soft, slightly powdery finish.

It is a daytime scent for warm weather and it stays cheerful in heat, which makes it a sound choice for a Highveld summer morning where heavier florals would collapse.

Performance is modest and always has been: five to seven hours from the eau de toilette, with the bright opening fading within the first hour and a soft musky-woody remainder. Two or three sprays is reasonable. Nina has generated a long line of coloured variants over nearly two decades, some of which have come and gone from production, and as a mass-market fragrance running that long it has seen batch variation. The original red apple remains the one in continuous production.