NOIR

NOIR is a luxury car air freshener range built around fragrance quality rather than novelty, with scents including Rouge, Billion, Great Oud, Leather, Credo and Code. The appeal is that they read as a proper fragrance rather than a cardboard tree, which is why they are popular in prestige and detailed cars. There are also bundles that let you choose any three, which is the sensible way to find the scent you actually want to live with.

Scent preference is personal, so the bundles that let you pick three are the practical starting point rather than committing to one full-size product. As a rough guide, Leather suits cars with leather interiors where you want the smell reinforced rather than covered, Great Oud is the richest and most distinctive, and Rouge, Billion, Credo and Code sit in more conventional fragrance territory. Bear in mind a strong fragrance in a small cabin reads much stronger than it does on the shelf.

It depends far more on how you use the car than on the product: heat, ventilation and direct sunlight all accelerate how quickly a fragrance dissipates, so a car parked in the sun with the vents open runs through it faster than one garaged. Keep it out of direct sunlight where you can. If the scent seems to fade fast, that is usually airflow rather than a fault.

No, and this is worth being direct about. A fragrance sits on top of an odour rather than removing its cause, so a damp carpet, a mouldy air conditioning system, a stale cabin filter or smoke residue will keep coming back through it. Clean the source first: extract the carpets, treat the air conditioning, change the cabin filter, then use the fragrance to finish the job rather than to hide it.