Roja Britannia Parfum

Roja Dove worked at Guerlain for the best part of twenty years from 1981, ending as its Global Ambassador, an appointment never before made from beyond the founding family, and acquiring the nickname Professeur de Parfums. The Roja Dove Haute Parfumerie opened at Harrods in 2004; Mayfair and his own house followed in 2011. Britannia, a 2016 parfum, comes from the period when he was working through explicitly British themes, and it is one of the more delicate things in that run.

It opens bright and citric - citron, tangerine, mandarin and bergamot together - and for a moment it seems as though it will be a cologne. It is not. The heart turns powdery almost immediately: heliotrope and violet with peach, champaca, Grasse jasmine, May rose and a little cassia. Heliotrope is the key material, a soft almond-vanilla-marzipan note that gives the whole composition its cushioned, faintly old-fashioned quality. The base is where it becomes unusual: cocoa and orris root alongside vanilla, ambergris, cinnamon, cloves, sandalwood, patchouli, vetiver and musk. The cocoa is dry and dusty rather than chocolatey, and it sits under the iris like the smell of an unopened tin.

This is a powdery floral for people who genuinely like powder - a cool-weather scent, best after dark, and entirely at home on a still Cape winter evening. It is listed as unisex and does lean feminine in wear. Anyone who loves the classic Guerlain drydowns will recognise the grammar here, which is unsurprising given where Dove learned it.

Two things to be straight about. Britannia is no longer in Roja's current line-up; it appears to have been discontinued, which makes availability the main constraint. And parfum concentration notwithstanding, powdery iris-heliotrope compositions do not project like ambers - expect eight to ten hours of life with a soft, close trail after the first two, and a scent that registers at close range rather than on arrival.