We didn't settle for just a great first impression.

Fragrance was supposed to be one of the easier parts. Find something we liked, put it into the formula, and move on. At least, that was the idea. Then we started smelling things.

Some fragrances made an excellent first impression. You smell them once and immediately think, yes, this is good. Then you wear them. Twenty minutes later, still good. A few hours later, less interesting. By the end of the day, what you liked in the beginning had either disappeared completely or become something much flatter.

That changed the question. It was no longer about whether we liked a fragrance when we first smelled it. It was whether we would still like wearing it several hours later. That turned out to be a much harder test.

“The perfume must be beautiful at every stage.”

— Jean-Claude Ellena

We were already used to fragrances that had a little more going on. An opening that caught your attention, something different underneath it, and a dry-down that made sense several hours later. You didn't smell exactly the same thing all day, and that was part of the appeal. The fragrance changed, but never seemed to lose itself.

We wanted that same sense of progression in a deodorant. Not something that announced itself once and disappeared, but something you could put on in the morning and still be happy to smell later.

“If I want to wear that vision with me every day until the bottle is all used-up, then that’s the perfume I’ll purchase.”

— C. JoyBell C.

That was, in a way, the test we were trying to create.

Not: Do we like this?

But: Would we choose to live with it?

That ruled out quite a lot. Some versions opened beautifully and disappeared too quickly. Some lasted, but lost the part we liked about them. Some became sweeter. Some became sharper. Some stayed remarkably consistent and were, unfortunately, remarkably boring.

And there were plenty that smelled perfectly good. They just weren't fragrances we wanted to live with every day. So we kept going. Eventually, two stayed.

High Ground opens with lemon, mint and ginger, followed by juniper, cardamom and geranium. Underneath, vetiver, Amberwood and tonka bean give it somewhere deeper to go.

Open Water starts with grapefruit and violet leaf, moves through sea notes, violet and rosewood, and settles into ambergris and Amberwood.

They are very different from each other. That was intentional. One feels brighter and more lifted. The other moves in a different direction altogether. But they share the thing we had become particular about: neither one is only about the first impression.

There was another distinction we kept coming back to. Fragrance and odour control are not the same job. We didn't want to make a stronger fragrance and call that better deodorising. The deodorising system handles odour. Fragrance has a different job.

It should smell good. It should develop on skin. And, perhaps most importantly, it should be something you actually enjoy putting on. Because fragrance isn't only about what you smell in the moment. It can stay with you, change with you, and become attached to the day you're having.

“For scents, like musical sounds, are rare sublimaters of the essence of memory.”

— George du Maurier

Maybe that's part of why the right fragrance matters more than it first seems. You don't simply smell it once. You live with it.

We started by asking which fragrance we liked most. By the end, the question had changed.

Which one would we still want to smell eight hours later?

That turned out to be much harder. And much more useful. Because the best fragrance isn't necessarily the one that wins the first few minutes. It's the one that makes you glad you chose it that morning.