The Arabian Heritage Collection by Areej Le Doré is a deliberately minimalist collection, focused on the three materials that are not only critical to Arabian or mukhallat style perfumery but happen to be the recurring motifs of each Areej Le Doré collection – ambergris (Al Ambar), oud (Al Oud) and sandalwood (Al Sandal). As always, when I smell an Areej Le Doré collection, I try to evaluate what I am smelling through the lens of audience (who is this for?), identity (which hat is Russian Adam wearing now?), and the newcomer’s virgin nose (how would an ordinary person experience this?).
In short order, audience-wise, this collection is for someone who takes pleasure in the raw materials more than in the finished product, speaking of identity, this is Russian Adam in ‘art dealer’ mode, curating and polishing the gems of Arabian perfumery for the consumption by wealthy connoisseurs, and as to what an ordinary person would think of them, well. This is what these reviews are for.
Al Ambar is a study of a lump of a grade of ambergris that sits between the ghostly, vanillic newspaper of white ambergris and the turd-like foulness of soft, black ambergris, meaning that this mammalian secrete has been partially but not fully cured by years bobbing around in the ocean. I have smelled ambergris of all grades (see article) and to me, this smells like what ambergris hunters call brown or grey ambergris, highly prized in Middle Eastern perfumery for its retention of the animalic funk of black ambergris without falling to pieces in a tincture as black ambergris does.
Now, disclaimer. Whether Al Ambar smells good or bad to you will depend on how exposed you’ve been to the strong smells of the countryside, coastal tides, and to a lesser extent, rural machinery. To me, therefore, Al Ambar doesn’t smell bad, per se, but it does smell incredibly pungent. It smells like the marshy soil near the harbor at low tide, the bleached bones of dead seagulls, the piles of rubber tires and tackle in sleepy farmyards, dental floss after a good cleaning, and the closed up gunk scraped out of a horse’s hoof with a pick. The sheer intensity of this collective of organic smells is hard to take at first, even for someone who has dug lambs out of sheep with her bare hands.
But when the wall of sound effect starts to loosen up a bit, there is pleasure to be found in examining the smaller, quieter notes in the after trail – a hint of powder, something resinous, a vein of sweetish, melted tar. I have smelled ambergris tinctures that smelled like the first half of this fragrance, but the far reaches of Al Ambar reveal a supporting cast of other materials not present in a tincture. So, though never truly a complete perfume, you do get glimpses here and there of the scaffolding put there by the perfumer to position the ambergris.
Al Ambar is mostly a curiosity piece, however, something a collector in the Middle East might pull out to mull over with his friends (or to shock the uninitiated) rather than something one could seriously wear. It is not dirty or foul-smelling, per se, but there’s no avoiding the fact that it is the sort of pungent, environmental pong that makes you roll up the car windows on a drive.
Al Oud is a Russian Oud classic – he is a man who loves the feral, bleu cheese blast of a good Hindi oud, and here, despite dressing it up with a touch of berried Cambodi and a bear pelt-ish Chinese oud, Al Oud’s Hindi profile rings out as clear as day. Forget the other notes – there is no contest. My brother’s ex-girlfriend, who was French (still is, I assume), would visit my husband and me in our small apartment, and microwave her bleu cheese for 30 seconds before scooping it up into her mouth on a cracker. The intensely animalic aroma would impregnate the walls, the curtains, and the furniture for a full week afterwards.
The oud in Al Oud smells similar, albeit crossed with that unmistakable bile duct sourness of the wood rot that sets in with a long, long soak of the oud chips in a barrel of water. Later on, there is scads of hay, leather, horse sweat, dander, and damp horse blankets, as per the Hindi oud rulebook.
Over the years, I have come to appreciate the nobility and complexity of Hindi oud, but there is a note here that I cannot love, and that is the scent of pelt rot, specifically the stale, claggy aroma of an animal fur that has been closed up in a small space without having been fully dried or aired out before storage. I can take the scent of dry rot – but leather or wood or wool that is even slightly ‘wet’ at the edges starts to degrade quicker, tipping it over the edge from ‘pleasantly musty’ to alarmingly unhealthy or wrong-smelling, like the smell of a wound under a tightly wrapped bandage. Though it is similar to Russian Adam’s own History of Indian Oud, Al Oud is a little rawer and far less spicy, so I instinctively like it less. But that’s just me. A Hindi oud nut will like this just as much as they would any of Feel Oud’s Hindi-style distillations.
Al Sandal made me want to cry. It is sad that the only way one can experience real sandalwood of this quality these days is through a limited batch run by an artisan distiller-perfumer that is both expensive and hard to get your hands on. I am grateful to have the chance to smell this, but cannot help feeling sorry for the people who love real sandalwood and for whom Al Sandal is out of reach.
Smell this and your true north of sandalwood is re-set. Afterwards, you are never able to smell a modern niche ‘sandalwood’ perfume without also smelling the loud, trashy fakery of Javanol or Ebanol. It is like drinking fresh, full fat milk straight from the cow, then moving to the city and trying to fill the yawning gap with those plastic nipples of UHT creamer at a buffet breakfast.
The sandalwood in Al Sandal isn’t Mysore sandalwood – very little can be, these days – but it does smell like one with a very high percentage of those all important santalols, the molecules in sandalwood responsible for its characteristic aroma. Apart from a lactic twang that is more buttermilk than yoghurt, this is a rich, warm, and almost buttery experience, a sort of ne plus ultra of sandalwoodiness. The dusky scent of freshly roasted and ground coffee beans settles a foamy, aromatic bitterness on its head, like a reverse Guinness, reminding me a little of Santal Nabataea by Mona di Orio.
Though it speaks with an indoor voice, as all genuine sandalwoods do, it gets straight to the point, plunging straight past the volatile wood esters to explore the savory, ‘reddish’ depth of the heartwood, big thick ‘nuggets’ of resin and spice knotted into the buttercream swirls of wood. Sandalwood always gets me in the emotional solar plexus. It’s the contrasts for me, that finely tuned but constant tug of war between the fresh, aromatic bitterness of wood and the incensey sweetness of resin in that same wood, something most people would understand as the play of arid and creamy.
I am not sure I ever smelled sandalwood oil as a child but Al Sandal is a scent that seems hard wired into me somehow. I hope it is not sacrilegious to say, but it reminds of one of Ensar Oud’s famous Mysore sandalwoods – generally richer, incense-ier, and less pine fresh than the Feel Oud examples – mixed with a rose hydrosol, shaken vigorously, and then applied liberally all over. My sincere wish is for a bottle of this, diluted in a one liter bottle, and kept beside my bed for the times when my insomnia is wearing on me like a ragged nail.
Source of samples: Sent to me by Russian Adam for free, for review.
Cover Image: Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
