Roja A Goodnight Kiss Parfum

Of everything Roja Dove has made, this is the one with the clearest autobiography attached. His own note on it describes his mother coming to kiss him goodnight when he was about six, and the resonating scent of her face powder and perfume that lingered in the room once she had kissed him goodnight, which he calls the beginning of his love for perfume. A Goodnight Kiss, released in 2015, is an attempt to reconstruct that memory, and the house's note list gives the game away: there is a rice powder accord in the base.

It is an unapologetically old-fashioned perfume, and that is a compliment. Aldehydes and bergamot open it with a cool, waxy sparkle that immediately signals mid-century French perfumery. The heart is a full floral bouquet of a kind almost nobody composes any more, with Rose de Mai, orange blossom, Jasmin de Grasse, ylang ylang, carnation and violet layered rather than blended, and the carnation's clove-spice giving the whole thing definition. Then it settles into orris, that rice powder, cedarwood, a thread of leather and musk. The dry-down is soft, dusty and warm, closer to the inside of a well-kept handbag than to a garden. Roja files it as floral, elegant, sparkling and nostalgic, and nostalgic is the operative word.

It is not a young fragrance and does not try to be. It suits an evening, a cold one, a Cape winter dinner rather than a summer function. It also suits people who already love vintage-style florals and have grown tired of fruity musks. This is the alternative.

Performance is what you would expect from parfum concentration, which is what Roja sells it at rather than an eau de parfum. Expect ten to twelve hours with moderate projection, because powdery florals radiate rather than punch. It fills a personal space rather than a room, and that is the intended effect. One or two applications is plenty. Roja Dove gave close to twenty years to Guerlain from 1981, rising to Global Ambassador as the first appointment from beyond the founding family, and the house bearing his name was established in Mayfair, London, during 2011. This fragrance is the clearest evidence of what he learned there.