Sceptre

Sceptre is the most ambitious thing Riggs makes, and the reference point will be obvious to anyone who has spent time around modern niche fragrance. Saffron and raspberry open together, a pairing that has become shorthand for expensive since a certain Parisian house built a phenomenon on it. Pink pepper adds bite behind them. The fruit is well handled: tart rather than jammy, and it never tips into the confected sweetness that ruins cheaper attempts at this style. The heart brings jasmine and orris, the jasmine adding a warm indolic fullness and the orris keeping things cool and powdery underneath, with violet leaf running green through the middle. Then the base arrives and the fragrance shows what it actually is: leather, patchouli and ambroxan, with the ambroxan doing most of the projection work. That is a familiar modern combination and it performs reliably, giving seven or eight hours with a persistent hum in the air around the wearer. It is genuinely unisex, more so than the bottle's styling suggests. Autumn and winter suit it best, though it survives a spring evening. Wear it out rather than to work, where the ambroxan can be fatiguing in close quarters. It is not an original composition, and it does not pretend to be, but as a route into this style at under fifty pounds it makes a strong case for itself.