The name promises an Australian caviar citrus; the formula rests on an ordinary lemon, a verbena and an orange blossom heart that vetiver closes off. It is the most constructed of the colognes in the 1902 collection, the only one that truly leaves the citrus register before fading out, and the one that holds best on a shirt collar.
The opening is crisp and sharp. Lemon dominates, yellow and acidic, without the candied sweetness found in modern citrus fragrances; verbena clings to it immediately, also lemony but by a different route, with that crushed green of a leaf rubbed between the fingers. Together the two produce the sparkling effect claimed on the box, a sort of dry crackle that lasts a few minutes.
The heart arrives quickly and calms things down. Orange blossom settles in, but discreetly, far from the bouquet it forms when given the lead role: here it serves to round off the edges left by the citrus, to lay a bit of flesh on a very bony structure. The house speaks of aquatic notes at this point; one might instead hear a transparency, a dilution effect, that keeps the floral from weighing things down.
The base makes the difference with the house's other colognes. Vetiver gives an earthy, almost root-like dryness, and musk that veil of cleanliness that extends the trail. The ingredients list offers two converging clues: Virginia cedarwood oil, a dry, chalky wood, and beta-caryophyllene, a peppery molecule found in black pepper as well as in clove. The result is nothing like a heavy woody accord — it is a shadow cast beneath the citrus.
Three other materials appear on the back of the bottle without showing up in the pyramid: bitter orange, bergamot and coumarin. The first two widen the opening, the third installs that sweetness of cut hay and almond that often lingers in classic eaux de Cologne. None of this shifts the overall reading, but it explains why the juice seems less sharp after half an hour than at the moment it is applied.
The trajectory is therefore longer than that of its neighbors, without becoming a fragrance of great longevity. On skin, the citrus fades within a short hour and leaves a discreet base that lingers a while longer; on a collar or a scarf, the whole extends noticeably. It is an afternoon cologne rather than a post-shower one — the kind reapplied at three in the afternoon because the day stretches on. On fabric, it survives one wash too many, which is no small praise for a water sold by the liter, or nearly so.