Creed Green Irish Tweed Eau de Parfum 100 ml

Crushed grass, cold lemon and a whisper of mint - Green Irish Tweed opens the way a golf course smells at seven in the morning. Olivier Creed and Pierre Bourdon built it in 1985, and four decades later it is still the reference point for what people mean by a clean green fougere. Verbena and galbanum give the opening its sap-green bite, geranium and violet keep the middle soft rather than sharp, and the dry down is mossy woods with ambroxan doing the quiet heavy lifting.

Top: Peppermint, verbena, lemon, bergamot, galbanum · Heart: Geranium, lavender, violet · Base: Sandalwood, cedarwood, ambroxan, oakmoss

Six to eight hours is the honest number, with the first two doing most of the projecting. Green fragrances are usually the first casualty of a South Florida summer - the citrus burns off, the greenery flattens, and you are down to a whisper by lunch. This one holds up better than most because the ambroxan and oakmoss base carries the composition once the top notes evaporate, and that base gets clearer in humid air rather than muddier. What changes here is the shape: in a dry climate it stays green for hours, while in Miami it turns woody and mossy faster and reads cleaner, closer to skin. Spray the shirt as well as the neck and you will get the full arc.

Daytime, and difficult to wear wrong. Office-safe in the truest sense - it smells groomed rather than perfumed - and it flatters a suit and a linen shirt equally. Spring and summer mornings are its best window, and it is one of the few classic masculines that does not feel out of place in eighty-eight-degree weather.

A 5ml or 10ml decant is the sensible way to learn whether the violet-and-moss dry down suits your skin, since this one shifts more from person to person than its reputation suggests. Or smell it on paper and on your wrist at the Miami Gardens counter and settle the question the same afternoon.