I like to swap and change between perfumes but Hugo Deep Red has been a big favourite of mine for quite a few years now. It was a lucky find actually, one year money was extremely tight around Christmas and although we had decided not to give one another presents that year Mark said I could choose something out of a catalogue we were running at the time. I opted for this simply because there was a choice of around ten perfumes in the catalogue, with Hugo Boss being the best label of all of them.

It's a gorgeous perfume though and since then I've always made sure I have a bottle. The fragrance is quite a heavy one, more suitable perhaps for evening wear although I personally use it whenever I fancy smelling of Deep Red.

The bottle is absolutely stunning, very understated compared to a lot of perfumes available but this is the beauty of it in my opinion. The frosted glass bottle is very heavy and looks extremely classy among my other perfume bottles, the silvered cap has a bit of a cheap look and that's a shame but it has been the exact same colour and design since I began buying it so the cap obviously works!

The smell of Deep Red is amazing. It is floral and fruity, with a slight woody fragrance which comes through towards the end of its life. To me it has a sophisticated yet fun fragrance which lingers on for much longer than you expect it to.

The first spray will bring you fruitiness, this comes from blackcurrant and blood orange top notes. I find it can make me sneeze a bit if I spray it in a small room as the fruity aroma is quite strong, it doesn't cloud the air as some cheaper perfumes can but it definitely has one of those initial smells that can get right up your nose!

This soon calms down though and although the perfume continues to be a strong one, the different aromas all start coming through separately and that does help to tone the overall fragrance down. I love the fact that the fruitiness lingers for quite a long time, in fact even after the more floral middle notes have started to appear I can still detect the blackcurrant and pear underneath when in other perfumes these would have disappeared long before.

This fruity/floral mixture lasts for hours on my skin, I know all perfumes depend on what type of skin the wearer has but after speaking to several Deep Red users I can honestly say that it seems to be very long lasting for most people. The only person who has had problems with its longevity being my aunt, who smokes 60 fags a day and would have problems making the stink of cat sh*t linger through the fug of smoke which follows her around.

When the perfume has died down, you'll be left with a beautiful sweet and woody aroma. This is created by the base notes of sandalwood, vanilla and cedarwood. I personally can't pick out the vanilla in this perfume which is a shame as that is one of my very favourite smells ever, it does give Deep Red its delicious sweetness however and I always think the end fragrance (just before it needs topping up) is very much like walking past (but not into) a Lush shop.

As Deep Red is an Eau de Parfum, it is far more long lasting than EDT varieties. A good spray at the start of the evening means I don't have to lug a bottle of perfume around with me as I'm confident that the scent will linger on my skin for as long as I am out, something which is even better now there's no smoking in pubs.

£24 for a 50ml bottle from John Lewis.