Roja Reckless Pour Homme Parfum

Chypres are not fashionable and have not been for thirty years, which makes Reckless Pour Homme a slightly stubborn thing for a house to keep in its range. Roja's own description of it is admirably direct: a spicy chypre built on five lively spices, namely ginger, cinnamon, clove, cardamom and black pepper, laid over an aromatic layer of lavender, artemisia and bay leaf and settling on cedarwood, moss and woods. That is the fragrance. There is no twist.

What the note list does not convey is how bracing the first ten minutes are. Bay leaf and lavender arrive over lemon and bergamot with a bitter, camphorous artemisia edge, and the effect is closer to an old-fashioned barbershop than to anything sweet. Rose and jasmine sit in the heart, but as structure rather than decoration; you register them as roundness, not as flowers. Then the spices come forward and stay, and the balance is the clever part. Cinnamon and clove could easily turn this into a Christmas candle, but the cardamom and black pepper keep it dry and the ginger keeps it lifted.

The base is where the chypre part earns its name. Oakmoss and vetiver give an earthy bitterness, cedar and cypress add a resinous green, labdanum and styrax bring a warm leathery-balsamic depth, and orris and tonka soften the finish just enough to make it wearable rather than austere. Incense drifts through the last hours.

This is autumn and winter territory. On a cold Highveld morning it is superb, the spices reading crisp rather than heavy, and it works for formal daytime as easily as evening.

Performance is very strong. In parfum strength expect ten to twelve hours, often more, with commanding projection for the first three and a firm mossy-woody presence for the rest. Shirts will smell of it after a wash. The only real warnings are seasonal and dosage-related: in summer heat the spice-and-moss combination becomes hot and can read as dated, and two sprays is the upper limit for shared spaces. Applied properly, it is one of the more genuinely classical masculine fragrances still in production.