Issey Miyake Perfumes & Colognes

Six bottles, five men’s and one women’s, all Eau de Toilette. One of them changed what a whole generation of fragrance smelled like.

The fragrance that made water a note

L’Eau d’Issey arrived in 1992, built on Issey Miyake’s idea that water was the material worth working from. Lotus, melon and freesia over white musk — transparent where almost everything else on a counter was heavy, and clean in a way perfume had not really tried to be.

It is one of the two or three fragrances that created the modern aquatic style, and the twenty years that followed were built on what it started. If a fragrance has ever been described to you as “fresh” or “clean”, the lineage runs back through here.

Miyake himself was a designer known for pleating — garments made from a single piece of cloth, folded rather than cut — and the same instinct shows in the bottle: a plain cone with a single sphere at the tip, and nothing else.

The six

L’Eau d’Issey Pour Homme is the men’s original and the least expensive bottle here. Intense is the warmer, woodier version; Sport the sharper and more citrus one; L’Eau Bleue the greenest. Nuit d’Issey is the outlier — darker and drier than the rest, and the only one that does not smell like the family.

The women’s L’Eau d’Issey is the 1992 original, and it is worth smelling whichever side of the page you are shopping.

What to expect

All six are Eau de Toilette, which suits them — these are meant to be light, and making them heavier would defeat the idea. Expect daytime wear that sits close rather than filling a room.

For the same restraint, Bvlgari and Giorgio Armani are the two we would put beside it. Five are under men’s cologne.