To be frank, 90% of the perfumes I smell are disappointing, if not downright awful. Which is why I’m starting a series dedicated to reviewing (or should that be ‘roasting’) the duds.
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?).
Living on the equator has its advantages – year-round warmth, sun, lush greenery, the endless availability of mangoes – but heading into my second autumn in Africa, I do find myself longing for the change of seasons. With only minute differences between summer and winter in the Tropics, the only leaves you see turning brown are the ones offed by drought.
Though I certainly don’t want to fetishize autumn in Northern Europe, being all too well acquainted with its cold, dreary reality, there are certain scenes that occupy the no man’s land between fantasy and half-remembered moments of perfection. My father’s military line of silver birches, for example, starkly framed against the burnt red of his maples. Walks along an empty Curracloe Beach, numb red hands thrust into the ends of scarves. The wan, silvery quality of skies backlit by a source of light rumored by Irish weathercasters to be the sun.
Because I am more Morrissey than Taylor Swift, I tend to lean into the bleakness rather than try to bank it down with the perfumed equivalent of a pumpkin spice latte. Something about my perfumes also needs to smell like an ending – a bit bitter, dry, emotionally remote.
Chêne by Serge Lutens is a fragrance I think about far more than I wear. Such a disarmingly simple smell, yet so affecting. Lacquered school pencils split open at the root and inhaled deeply – a dense, ‘packed’ aromascape of varnish, cedar, and powder, coated in a soft, waxy mien that hovers between intense sweetness and intense bitterness in the same way a raisin does. It smells boozy but in a dry, aromatic way, more the honk of volatile wood esters effervescing from a freshly split log than a glass of whiskey. I know this makes it sound like a dramatic scent, but really, there is a stillness to this scent that makes you bend your head to listen. Smelling Chêne feels a bit like watching one of those elaborate sand drawings being made, layers of dun-, ochre- and taupe-colored sand gently swept in and over each other until a vague shape begins to emerge.
Though I originally said that English Oak and Hazelnut by Jo Malone smelled like deep winter, I take that back. Similarly minimalistic and stark as Chêne – albeit less poetic – there is something quite bleak about this perfume that matches the crisp crunch of leaves underfoot and bleachy skies of a late autumn walk.
Tabac Tabou by Parfum d’Empire mines the connective tissue between immortelle and narcissus, a richly stinky inter-webbing of burnished, sunlit molecules redolent of sunburnt hay, damp pouch tobacco, honey, and crushed wildflower stalks and manages to smell gloriously faded just two minutes in on the skin. I don’t know how the perfumer (Marc-Antoine Corticchiato) pulled this off, but Tabac Tabou smells both wildly naturalistic – like you’ve just been rolling around in a clean stable full of hay, plant semen, dried wildflowers, daisy chains, and leather or horse hair blankets – and polished (staid almost), fully at home on an older lady playing canasta in a tearoom on a Tuesday afternoon. I think this is because the vivid, animalic undercarriage of the scent, full of pungent, velvety musks and old honey, has some of its horny aliveness choked out of it by its chypric dog collar. I love this scent, but sometimes it is perfect and sometimes it makes my skin crawl.
United in immortelle, Tabac Tabou shares some of its wilted, sunburnt brownness with The Afternoon of a Faun by État Libre d’Orange, but little of its warmth. This one muscles its way into the green rose chypre category with a vibe halfway between a drenched forest and a bowl full of crushed orris roots. It recalls the burnt coffee grounds and hairspray topnotes of a badly turned vintage No. 19 pure parfum I once owned. Though the immortelle note smells like sugared hay boiled down in whiskey, it also smells savory and dry, like celery salt. Wearing it feels like a pair of fabulous, wide-cut corduroy slacks that are both comfortable and capable of making you look like Marlene Dietrich.
Le Smoking by DSH Parfums makes me feel sad in a way that I like – a self-indulgent type of sadness, the one you wallow in for a few hours because you know you can set it aside just as easily as you brought it on. The galbanum in Le Smoking is not the fresh, resinous green bell pepper sort but one that smells murky, poisonous, and cold, like smoke drifting across a window pane. Lots of dusty tobacco, vetiver, and oakmoss together create a pleasantly stale, acrid accord, a column of ash waiting to drop off a cigarette. A jaded, lived in ‘brown’ scent that feels right for right now.
These days I want spice, too, but only if it’s as dry as a bone and sits somewhere on the tonal slide between griege and porridge on a Pantone chart. Heaven Can Wait by Editions de Parfums Frédéric Malle, with its juxtaposition between cold, rooty iris and warm spice, fits the bill. Despite the clove and plum, this is a fragrance that feels cool and standoffish. Initially, it recalls the gripe-water musks of L’Eau d’Hiver and the thin, hawthorn-ish suede of Cuir d’Ange, with a faint brush of Superstitious‘ green-copper acid over top. In the drydown, something dry and gippy ‘catches’ at the corners of the scent, threatening to unspool the silk. The freshly-poured cement aspect of cashmeran, perhaps, or the raw, parnsippy character of the orris lingering long after the topnotes have burned off. More greige than Dior’s Gris Dior.
Eyes Closed by Byredo dresses up a dove-grey iris suede (very much like Dior Homme) in a fine coating of baking spices, mostly cinnamon and cardamom. This accord is distinguished in the opening by a remarkable carrot seed material that gives it an earthy, musky ‘cloudiness’ – like someone coming in and smudging all the lines on a charcoal drawing. It smells rather like the dry ingredients of a carrot cake or a Christmas cake before all the booze, melted butter, and sozzled dried fruit get poured in. I like this fragrance because it is arid and unsweet, the richness of its spice mélange untethered to any gooey basenotes, cutting it free to float on the air. I find it to be pleasingly masculine. But it is too intense – almost unpleasant – to smell straight from the skin, and so powerful that the scent gets a bit monotonous after a few hours. That’s why the way you wear this one counts. Like Chergui and Patchouli 24, a discreet dab on the end of your scarf or on one knuckle is enough to scent your entire ecosystem.
Only if the hidden flower in Fleur Cachée by Anatole Lebreton is immortelle does this scent’s title make sense – though it is more likely to be the intensely syrupy-dry-curried-celery aspect of fenugreek seed that is giving immortelle than immortelle itself. Think of a flavor that marries the medicinal warmth of nutmeg to the cool, watery herbal feel of dill or celery, and that is fenugreek. Anyway, this smells like the inside of a sauna constructed entirely of sandalwood – dry, ‘baked’, almost sandy in texture. There is a bold flourish of coffee grounds, which, combined with the hot sauna aura, makes me think of the original Eau Noire (Dior) or even the magnificent Santal Nabataea by Mona di Orio. In the end, I don’t find anything remotely floral or vanilla in Fleur Cachée – this is simply a stunningly dry, but also sweaty-spicy-vegetal sandal in the vein of one of my all-time favorite perfumes, Santal de Mysore by Serge Lutens, just a lot airier (and cheaper).
Though I do not want the cosseting sweetness or fullness of tonka, vanillas, or tobaccos just yet, I will take the more restrained takes. Lothair by Penhaligon’s calls to mind my daughter’s recent exclamation at seeing one of the men on Love is Blind UK, ‘Oh my God, he’s so ugly. He looks Scottish,’ which, coming from a charming little airhead who thinks France is in Asia, is funny. I can kind of see what she means, though, because Lothair is a perfume that smells Scottish for no apparent reason other than I think the initial wallop of metallic lavender, starchy rhubarb, black pepper, and milky cedar is what I imagine a thick, purplish carpeting of thistle or heather on highlands to smell like. The punchy, herbal opening smells hoary and old-mannish to me in the best way possible, like an entrance hall thick with the smell of waxed jackets and tweeds and galoshes (and perhaps the odd bit of Lynx too, for good measure). High country pursuits, then, which, while not typically part of the cultural ‘scent’ lexicon for a woman in her forties from a working-class Irish background, still occupy a shape in the scent library of my mind. Lothair brings in some tonka bean towards the end, but it never smells creamy, just aromatic and kind of manly.
People say they smell fig and black tea in this, and that may be true, but I smell more of those hot metal bars on the old electric Calor gas heaters and the thick, fuzzy scent of wet wool fibers fluffing up when exposed to the intense heat confined to the 2cm radius of the bars. Kind of Gris Clair-ish but better, in that the metallic lavender-tonka combo keeps the screechiness to a minimum and clothes it all in a rich, dry, yet almost lactonic cedar that smells like a special type of incense only the rich can afford. It’s all very Sean Connery – gravel in the streets, butter in the sheets.
L’Air de Rien by Miller Harris is a perfume that I struggled with for years before finally giving in and learning to – if not love – then crave in small doses the very special thing this perfume does in marrying the ‘greasy scalp’ horror of costus to the inky, saline dust of tree moss, a hot metal spoon, a puffy plethora of unholy musks, the only neroli note in the world that doesn’t smell like citrus peel and soap, and an unsettlingly unsweet amber-vanilla. Old books and cranked up radiators at the start of winter have the same funk to them, as do the heads of children and small animals. Add clove and you edge closer to Fiore d’Ambra by Profumum Roma, another perfume that mixes the innocent with the foul until your brains scramble inside your skull. It smells like a freshly bathed human stuffed inside a three-day-old pinstripe suit, or being forced to participate in someone else’s kink for unwashed teeth. Unbearably intimate and yet utterly human in all its weirdness. Autumn is the perfect time to wear this, or whenever it becomes cold enough to start bathing every second day.
Like Chêne, Bohea Bohème by Mona di Orio is one of those fragrances occupies far more space in my head than it does on my skin. It doesn’t lend itself to easy classification, which is, I guess, part of the reason I find myself thinking about it even when I am a whole continent away from my bottle of it. Essentially, it is a minimally smoky, peppery tea scent that stretches itself over a sparse structure of wood, herbs, and greenery. But the scent distinguishes itself with an opening bristling with camphor and mint, providing the wear with a surprising jolt of bitterness that one can almost feel at the back of the tongue. The Listerine-like bitterness almost always fools me into thinking – absentmindedly – that I have sprayed one of my more toothpaste-y tuberose perfumes recently and simply forgotten about it.
The drydown is a marvel, the woody tea and camphor levelling out into a note of sweet, papery tobacco and sun-scorched hay that takes on an unexpectedly rustic feel, diverging from the cool, urban aesthetic of the first half of the fragrance. Bohea Bohème does not have any heavy amber or vanilla weighing down the tea, just a surprisingly weightless benzoin that shifts through the air like a ribbon of smoke from a far-off campfire.
Weightlessness and transparency are also thoughtful features of Le Pavillon d’Or by Dusita Parfums, a fragrance that carries the green-gold-lilac duskiness of post-harvest meadows and field margins and hedgerows inside of it. Mint, iris, and honeysuckle combine to form a fresh, green opening that sometimes reminds me of Chanel. No. 19 and sometimes of Diorella (and sometimes of neither). There is an illusion of galbanum minus the bitterness, or of vetiver without its dankness. The main note here is fig leaf, which would explain the faintly milky quality to the greenness, but there’s none of the urinous quality that often sullies the vibrant smell of fig leaf. These opening notes are quickly coated with an overlay of what smells to me like the sweet, musty alfalfa grass notes (half hay, half Quaker’s oats) borrowed from one of my favorite Dusita perfumes, Erawan, but minus that scent’s dusky cocoa. There is also, here and there, a touch of Chanel’s Poudre Universelle Libre – a discreetly-perfumey, buff-colored skein of powder dusted over the scent’s cheekbones.
And, of course, there is always Iris Silver Mist by Serge Lutens. This is not perfume. It is either art or a form of water boarding, but it’s not a perfume. Iris Silver Mist teeters on a tightrope between beauty and brutality. The first blast out of the gate is of the purest iris root note ever created. I can almost taste the smell on the back of my tongue – mud, earth, metal, roots, dry ice pumped from a machine at a festival. Again, not perfume, not really. Raw potatoes soaking in ice cold water, rotting carrot tops, and the acrid fug of alcohol fumes rolling off a Poitín still. There is also the high-toned acid sting of fresh urine from a baby’s nappy but devoid of any of the warm, sweet-sour honey and hay overtones that makes baby pee such a friendly smell. This is cold and denatured, ureic acid grown in a sterile lab. Nothing of human origin.
Iris Silver Mist is not pleasant but it stirs my soul in a way that more pleasant perfumes do not. It makes me think of uncomfortable scenarios – teenagers facing the wall at the end of the Blair Witch Project, the tops of those dark pine trees swaying in the wind in Twin Peaks every time Coop entered the Red Room in the Black Lodge, the guy in nothing but y-fronts and a WW2 gas mask striding across a corn field at the end of episode 3 of True Detective. Think of basically anything that has ever chilled your soul, and that’s Iris Silver Mist. It is a work of art. Art in a gimp mask, yes, but still, art.
Source of Samples: All purchased by me in either sample or full bottle form at one point or another.
Cover Image: Photo by John Price on Unsplash
Narcotico
Narcotico follows a pattern I’ve begun to notice in the work of Giuseppe Imprezzabile, the perfumer behind Meo Fusciuni, in that the perfumes are all either monstrously complex facades hiding simple ideas, or deceptively simple perfumes masking an astonishing richness of detail.
Narcotico falls in the former category. The perfumer places an odd ‘upturned sod’ patchouli material, with nuances of sour soil, dry air, creeping rot, blood, metal, and leather, atop a relatively simple, powdered baby’s bottom of an amber-talc base. It’s like an unwashed wolf perched on top of a kitten. Everything interesting is happening inside the bounds of that patchouli material front-loaded into the first hour. Rather than beautiful, it smells half alluring, half foul. A thing of nature, yet also inorganic and strange.
Narcotico is an empty promise, though. It soon fizzles out into its quiet talc-like base, making you wonder if the first hour had happened at all. At the beginning, I was thinking that this was a truly different and original take on patchouli – a fertile cross between Noir Patchouli, Aromatics Elixir, and Vierges et Toreros – but its sudden cop out into a barely there amber affair feels like the ultimate bait and switch. Marescialla by Santa Maria Novella does what Narcotico promises to do – exorcism by patchouli – but for half the price.
Odor 93
Unlike Narcotico, Odor 93 is complex all the way through. Peel back any piece of its skin over its 24 hour trajectory and you’ll uncover a door cracked open to a different part of Narnia. Ostensibly a tuberose plunged into the gloom of soil, tobacco, and spice, it differs from other ‘darkened’ or ‘sullied’ white florals (Tubereuse Criminelle, Tubereuse III Animale, Daphne) by way of a clever and constant counterposing of notes that smell cheap and expensive, fun and salubrious, organic and chemical.
The opening is all Listerine, petrol, and bubblegum, but clearly also deeply floral, which is pleasantly confusing. There is a striking patchouli note that smells like earth – not patchouli, but soil, like a clump of dirt dug out of a forest floor, rich in humus and eau de decayed leaves. The tuberose itself is nightmarish in that it is syrupy sweet, bubblegummy, and a bit chemical, like a white floral cube of Turkish Delight peeled away from a plastic tray. But this in turn is compensated for by a rich, yellow, urinous-smelling narcissus and a horsey, honeyed wood-oud accord, which conspire to smell like the inside of a tobacco curing shed in summer. This is an extraordinary perfume. A bit hard to wear, yeah, but extraordinary.
On occasion, when I am smelling the very far drydown of Odor 93, I forget what I am wearing and it is only then that I understand this perfume to be built around a serious oriental-chypre base. It has the burnt-end ashiness of oakmoss (the dusty tobacco and patchouli acting in consort), a huge dollop of talc, and the bitterness of those ruby-red clove orientals that dominated the late 1980s, like Cinnabar and Opium. On balance, the perfume it most reminds me of is the older, original version of Sacrebleu by Parfums de Nicolai, another spicy-bubblegummy tuberose oriental, but one that lacks the complexity of Odor’s surround sound system. Odor 93 is an example of a perfume that, while it doesn’t suit my personal taste at all, is so unabashedly brilliant that anything other than a glowing review would be stupid.
L’Oblio
L’Oblio is a lovely, pleasing perfume, but it lives up to its name – oblivion, forgetfulness – by gliding over the curves and grooves of my brain and out my left ear like a half-remembered thought. And like my half-remembered thought, I am sure it was genius and that the world is all the poorer for not knowing it, but what can I do? It is gone now.
L’Oblio is one of those Meo Fusciuni perfumes that makes you understand how his entire oeuvre is divided into two textures – one ethereal and gossamer-light, the other as dense as wax. L’Oblio belongs to the former category. It is almost maddeningly vague, a whispering thing of spearmint breath, blue bottle Nivea, gum, green tea, Japanese stick incense, and the papery dustiness of old books (benzoin), all extremely pleasant and yet of no definite shape other than a faded memory of those cornstarch-dusted candy cigarettes they would give children in the 1980s. The sourness of old tea hangs around at the end, adding a musty, brackish note that fights back against the nothingness of the scent. Ultimately, though, it amounts to very little, like someone who has their hand raised last in a Teams meeting and realizes too late that everything interesting or important has already been said, so ends up muttering ‘I’d just like to add my support for what Allison said’.
Source of Samples: I purchased my Meo Fusciuni sample set from the Italian retailer, 50 ML, here.
Cover Image: Photo by davisuko on Unsplash
Luce
Luce is like a plain girl whose face suddenly transforms when she smiles. Full of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moments that shuffle so quietly underneath its sweet, minty beeswax skin that you’d be forgiven for writing it off as an amber, this is a scent that rewards close study. My first impression is of sugared aniseed and vinyl set against a dark green backdrop of fir trees, underscored with a touch of adiposal fat coagulating on a dead animal. Somehow, this works – a multi-dimensional taste at the back of your tongue that draws all the bickering fresh, bitter, fatty, medicinal, and plastic notes to a warm, soft bosom that stifles all sound, let alone conflict.
It is only later, when Luce has moved on from its camphoraceous to its long, sweet, powdery drydown that I realize that this is an essay on benzoin. No wonder people look at this and think ‘amber’. But to me, benzoin on its own smells at once more subtle and more complex than when it is placed in an amber accord with vanilla and labdanum. Here, shorn and unadorned, it smells uniquely of itself – slightly ‘gippy’, like dampened potato flour, minty-camphoraceous, and of course, like incense, specifically unlit papiers d’armenie, those little strips of porous paper dipped in benzoin resinoid. This accord is attractively moldy or even ‘musty’, a quality your brain doesn’t normally associate pleasantly with a perfume but switches gears when it smells the same thing in a library full of old books, wafting decaying lignin spores into the ether.
Much of the same in the drydown, except for a hawthornish suede accent – think elegant Chamois glove leather – that lends the bookish dust some much needed structure. There is also, in my mind, a memory link between the hawthorn note and the anise note at the beginning, something hauntingly gripe-watery, sweet, and herbal.
Luce feels very original to me, but of course, as I write and sniff, three fragrances with similar vibes jump to mind, namely; Guerlain’s Bois d’Armenie (those sweet, dusty incense burning papers), Mona di Orio’s Bohea Boheme (a slightly bitter, camphoraceous benzoin-tea scent with a powdery drydown), and Guerlain’s Cuir Beluga (the same white, creamy hawthorn suede). Quiet scents all, but Luce is quieter still. In fact, sometimes, I strain to hear its little voice at all. I rarely ask for scents to be stronger than they are – because someone somewhere will inevitably hear that as a plea for more Norlimbanol or Clearwood – but in the case of Luce, I would love the volume turned up by 30%, please.
Notturno
Notturno is bad, but doesn’t even have the grace to be memorably bad. It is just bad in a ‘thin, doesn’t smell great, and definitely doesn’t belong in the catalogue of an artisan perfumer’ kind of way. Unlike my other Meo Fusciuni samples, which I use to the last drop either to make sure I fully understand them or because I enjoy smelling them, Notturno is the only one that lolls around on my dresser, half full, until I inevitably spot it, wonder if I’ll like that, spray some on and instantly remember that not only do I not like it at all, but I clearly can’t remember a single thing about it, hence the cycle.
Here’s why it’s bad – not why I think it’s bad but why it’s objectively bad – it is really nothing more than a single rum ether stuck on top of a burnt sugar, Maltol-sticky wood aromachemical that smells like a section excised from By the Fireplace and spread out in a thin schmear on your skin. I hate this note, primarily because it is a grandstanding gesture rather than an idea, but also because rum itself is cringe beyond the age of 19. For all of the 30 seconds it lasts, 5 seconds of it smells impressively like real rum (though we’ve established that that’s not the plus anyone thinks it is) and 25 seconds like the little bottles of rum flavoring you buy to put in cakes.
And that’s it, that’s the best part of this scent, done and dusted in under half a minute. What follows this damp squib of an opening is the chemical litany of whatever molecules people are stringing together these days to suggest leather, wood, or tobacco to an increasingly gullible (or nose blind) audience. Notturno means nocturnal, and from the reviews, it seems that most people are buying into a fantasy of whatever nocturnal means to them rather than smelling the scent for what it truly is. For once, the perfume isn’t the one with projection issues.
Source of Samples: I purchased my Meo Fusciuni sample set from the Italian retailer, 50 ML, here.
Cover Image: Photo by Jack Asis on Unsplash
#1 Nota di Viaggio (Rites de Passage)
The opening is pure Italian apothecary chic – a veritable cacophony of brackish herbs, aged citrus, and homemade toothpaste underscored by a streak of medicated foot powder and ye olde throat pastilles. Not unpleasant per se, but a jumbled up wall of smell that I associate with many of the openings of Italian artisanal perfumery, like Mem and Noun from Bogue, Lafeogrigio or Ladamo by O’Driu, or the more aromatic scents of Annette Neuffer (not Italian, but the style is similar).
Once this rather harsh, resinous basil-ade dies back, however, the rest of the scent is a wonderful chiaroscuro featuring a creamy, vegetal patchouli-vetiver accord, made more oily and bitter with a heady dose of rosewood – velvety, lush, dark – shot through with a bright floral sherbet of ylang and other flowers. The contrast between the salubrious, serious basenotes that tilt towards the bowels of the earth and the effervescent, slightly ‘Love Hearts’-ish accord is delightful. It’s deep, aromatic and soulful, but at the same time, filled with slivers of dancing light. I am determined to buy my husband a bottle of this for his next birthday.
#2 Nota di Viaggio (Shukran)
This is probably the most immediately arresting of the trio. It smells so strongly of spearmint and citrus soap in the beginning that I feel slightly sick but also like I’m just out of the shower. This feeling is confusing to me, in that I like its unusual freshness but dislike when the line between perfumery and toothpaste is crossed so decisively, and all within the first few moments. I begin to like this accord better once the glare on the mint softens a bit, allowing me to smell the other green, aromatic notes, like lemongrass and the gentler, honeyed hay-like tones of the chamomile.
I fool myself into thinking that this is heading in a Moroccan mint tea direction when suddenly, a boldly spiced tobacco leaf note swims into view, and from then on, I smell nothing but. The tobacco accent is light, untoasted, blond almost, but also so tightly threaded with clove, cinnamon, and star anise that it smells like a very unsweet gingerbread – a pain d’epices they might serve in a medieval monastery, where honey or dried fruits are considered a mortal sin and kept far away from the kitchen. If you’ve ever smelled Tan d’Epices by Andree Putman, then this is similar – indeed, so much so that I would hazard a guess that the same material has been used here, or the tobacco leaf-spice accord built out in the same way.
But before I can start fully warming up to #2, it is gone. Poof! And I mention that because performance beyond a four hour window is important to some. On the other hand, if you love Eau d’Hadrien by Annick Goutal or Eau d’Orange Verte by Hermes, for example, and treat them for what they really are – a ‘parfum du matin’ until you put on something more serious later on in the day – then #2 Nota di Viaggio (Shukran) could be a worthy addition to your wardrobe. It is unusual in that it takes extreme freshness in a thoroughly different direction, with mint and spicy blond tobacco substituting for the more standard citrus and moss.
#3 Nota di Viaggio (Ciavuru d’Amuri)
Something about this perfume is so incredibly nostalgic to me that I am not sure if I can review it objectively. Perhaps it is because it smells green, aromatic, and gently powdered to begin with, making me think of mimosa or Cassie flower, as well as the figs my Montenegrin mother in law picks from her tree before drying them and rolling them in a mixture of cornstarch and powdered sugar. Or perhaps it is because there is a ylang material in there that smells like the slightly dry, smoky leather accent in Cuir de Russie or the post-2015 Mitsouko. Whatever it is, it brings me right back to when I lived in the Mediterranean (Sicily, Montenegro), and, more than a place, to a time in my life when I was beginning to really discover perfume (or really great perfume), with that starchy ylang-mimosa like material acting as my own personal Proustian madeleine.
Objectively speaking, though, what I think makes this perfume great is that the perfumer connects the scent of ripe figs and the coarse, fruity creaminess of ylang via a note of rubber. Fig perfumes can be woody and coconutty (Philosykos) or astringent and pissy-fresh (Ninfeo Mio) but if you focus intently enough, you will notice that they are always, always slightly rubbery underneath the sweet, green freshness. A milky, sappy kind of rubber. The fig in #3 is far less green, woody, or coconutty than other examples, in that it smells warm and closely textured like the flesh inside the fruit, and as clean like a fig note in a clarifying shampoo. But there is a lingering undercurrent – subtle but present – of a gentle rubber, dusted with a fine white powder of unknown origin.
This accent connects so seamlessly with the grapey, fuel-y rubbery-ness of that ylang that you hardly notice that the core note has shifted from fig to ylang, from fruit to flower. I think it’s because these notes, that we think of as creamy or liquid, are quite dry here, drained of their essential humidity as the scent progresses. But there’s more to this scent than this skillful transition. These core accords are bathed in this gentle, herbal aura that is half sugared aniseed, and half resin dust – the kind of resins that have a cleansing, antiseptic character, like elemi or pine sap. #3 is not too much of one thing or the other, in fact, its defining character being that of having no fixed character at all. This is an ethereal changeling that makes you chase it down one leg of a maze and then another, smelling of completely different things from one wear to the next. Out of all the Nota di Viaggio series, #3 is the one that has charmed me the most.
Source of Samples: I purchased my Meo Fusciuni sample set from the Italian retailer, 50 ML, here.
Cover Image: Photo by Federico Burgalassi on Unsplash
When you move to Africa after a whole life spent in Europe, you quickly begin to grasp the economies of scale (and lack of trade tariffs) that made your nine euro litre of olive oil or four euro bottle of Pantene conditioner possible. In Africa, the rule of thumb is that everything that is imported is eye-wateringly expensive, while everything homegrown, like avocadoes, shea butter, and Uber drivers, can be had for pennies.
Interestingly, however, Middle-Eastern perfume, though technically imported, is as cheap as a bag of mangoes. This is because the import-export relationships set up by the large Saudi or Emirati-owned corporations catering to the significant Muslim population in East Africa (Carrefour is franchised, for example, by the Emirati firm Majid al Futtaim) allow Middle-Eastern perfumes to ride into this region on the same economies-of-scale train that travels the length and breadth of the European trade bloc.
All this to say, while I ration my single block of Parmesan cheese for months at a time, shaving it off in razor-thin slices onto my pasta as if it were a Goddamn white truffle, I have not been so parsimonious with the ole Lattafas. Now, fine perfume this is not. It is big, it is bold, and it more often than not is knocking off something way more expensive. But. But. There is something to be said for sinking your whole self into the sensory pleasure that is perfume for the price of one whole tube of CeraVe moisturizer.
Let’s take a good, long look at everything I’ve smelled, what I’ve gifted to others, and what I decided to buy for myself over the past year, because not even cheapies should be immune to critical inspection. I mean, sooner or later, three or four Lattafas add up to a whole bottle of olive oil, so one must draw a line somewhere.
The Good
Photo by Volkan Olmez on Unsplash
Lattafa Nasheet
Ostensibly a dupe of Nishane’s Ani, I find that Nasheet to be the better scent experience. It resolves several problems I have with Ani. First, while I love the green, almost pungent pop of ginger root and citrus of Ani’s topnotes, I find it meanders into a brief but mawkish ‘designer store aroma’ phase that I don’t love, before eventually re-righting itself into a creamy, resinous amberilla (half amber, half vanilla). Of course, that bit is as heavy as a brick wrapped in a duvet, so sometimes Ani’s drydown feels right-sized but sometimes it feels like trying to lift weights under water.
Nasheet’s innovation is that it feels like 60% of Ani on a good day. I can breathe in and around it. It carries the spice – more cardamom than ginger, meaning it is both fresher and less powdery – further into the amberilla accord, laying it out over the golden sweetness like a lace veil made of zesty black pepper. A beautiful orange peel note haunts the structure, more the scent of an orange peeled three hours ago in a nearby room than the volatile juiciness of a fresh one.
The glittery, sandy amberilla in the drydown is a spackling of mica on the skin, as diffuse as starlight. People call Ani a vanilla, which I don’t quite understand – if you add enough hard, crunchy resin to vanilla, what you end up with is amber. (I am conceding to the daub of vanilla that lurks within this amber accord by calling it an amberilla).
People also say that Nasheet is weak and disappears within two hours, but all that tells me is that a whole generation of noses have been permanently altered by over-exposure to brutish aromachemicals chosen for their extreme radiance, Amberwood, Norlimbanol, and Ambroxan among them. I feel sad for them, but also honor bound to point out when their poor, deformed noses are simply wrong – Nasheet hangs around all day long. It is discreet, yes, but present enough for colleagues to comment on my scent trail after an 11-hour day at the office. For those of you old enough to remember when perfumes lived and died on their own merit rather than limp on for eons via the easy-won brutality of modern woody ambers, listen to what I am telling you. Nasheet is endlessly pleasant without a trace of those modern poisons. And at twenty odd euros, I consider that a win.
Musamam White Intense
Of all my recent acquisitions – and this one I bought blind – Musamam White Intense is the most baffling. I bought it because all the descriptions I could fine online were for a creamy but fresh coconut-sandalwood scent. The only lactones I love are the ones that exist in nature, i.e., milky notes wrenched from peach skin, fig leaf sap, or sandalwood, rather than from an off-the-shelf aromachemical labelled ‘milk’ or ‘gelato’, so the naturally blond-on-blond idea of Musamam White Intense appealed greatly to me. But smelled blind, I would have pegged this more as the lime peel and rubbery, peachy undertones common to some frangipani materials, over a tart, pale lumberyard-ish wood that might be sandalwood but that could also be hinoki or oak, given its vague, slightly featureless woodiness (I guess I was right about the blond). While it’s true, technically, that there is a tiny bit of milkiness and a nuance one might conceivably define as coconutty if you squint hard enough, the character of this scent is mostly sour, silvery woods washed in a mineral stream with citrus rind.
Despite the gap between expectation and reality, I quite like Musamam White Intense and wear it the most out of all my recent acquisitions. Or, maybe it’s not so much that I like it but that I have yet to figure out what it smells like to me. It continuously evades my grasp, which frustrates me. It might be the rare case of a Lattafa that is abstract and therefore complex, or it might be that what this scent is going for is something like the scent of driftwood on a winter’s beach, in which case it nails the brief. Spun as a citrusy, woody ‘ambergris’ beachcomber scent, I get it. I can see that. Try to sell me Musamam White Intense as a creamy-milky-coconut thing, though, and I start to believe that most of the people reviewing it are either full of shit or are aping the review below them out of fear that what they are smelling must be ‘wrong’.
Bade’e Al Oud Amethyst
The neighborhood where I live is roughly 50% Muslim, 50% Christian, so I see my fair share of ladies wearing everything from the hijab and a relaxed niqab to the full-on burqa. They all seem to be wearing either Yara or Amethyst, billowing regally from beneath their voluminous folds. I was at a drag race rally (not sure if this is the right name for it) around Eid-al-Fitr in April, which I enjoyed intensely not because of the car racing but more for the deeply exotic scents mingling in the warm air – the hot rubber and asphalt from the screeching tires, the spicy, cuminy sweat of unwashed men’s shirts, and the intensely jammy rose and jasmine loudness of the combined perfumes steaming in thick roils off my niqabi ladies.
Amethyst captures everything of this event – the smoky, rubbery petrol fumes, the rich roses, the Turkish delight rosewater flavour, the Arabian jasmine – and even if it does immediately smell a little synthetic, it smells so fabulously out there and regal that you can’t help you be wowed. The thing that makes me pause – and the reason I haven’t bought a bottle yet – is that the drydown is a little sour and ashy, like me after a night in the pub. Still thinking about it, though.
Raghba
Kalemat on steroids. It smells exactly like warm treacle tart, which is made with Lyle’s Golden Syrup and breadcrumbs pressed gently into an all-butter, short-crust pie shell, but over a rubbery, slightly sour oud wood note that, although more joss stick than actual oud, is surprisingly effective at balancing out that syrupy sweetness. At its heart, it’s an amber, but I always feel that it is much more than that, and that the best I can do is to say it is warm dry wood meets nag champa meets toasty resin and a syrup facet that might be fruit or grain derived, but it doesn’t matter because it is both homespun and slightly exotic in a generic manner. I love it.
Khamrah Qahwah
People say that if you have Khamrah then owning Khamrah Qahwah is redundant – I strongly disagree. Khamrah Qahwah is a substantially better perfume. The addition of the bitter coffee grounds and fresh, almost green-lemony cardamom notes turn a dull, date-heavy dessert into something far more aromatic and rich in contrast.
The synthetic sawcut drone of the Ambroxan and the cheap, greasy coconut hairspray nuance of the original is muffled under the thick layer of warm, messy ambers and spices, and only ever bothers me when I’ve been swimming and the pool chemicals have peeled all this back to reveal the ugly synthetic skeleton. In general, though, this is smooth, rich, and a warm, nutty ‘brown’ scent on me, a sort of Lutensian-lite, easy listening shortcut to orientalia. I like that it reminds me of living in Brcko, where older Bosnian Muslim ladies taught me how to suck down the thickly matted Turkish coffee through a single cardamom pod clasped between my upper and lower front teeth. Khamrah Qahwah is similar in that it’s gently, not rudely, exotic.
Ana Abyedh Poudrée
Ana Abyedh Poudrée is a creamy, fluffy musk with enough rose and other florals to make it feel chewy, like a soft, white nougat wrapped in edible sugar paper. Loaded with what feels like cashmeran as well as several type of white musk molecules, it achieves a doughy cream-on-cream effect that I personally find irresistible. It is somewhat similar to Teint de Neige by Lorenzo Villoresi, but a little sharper and without the overwhelming density of powder that the Villoresi scent famously brings. The powder aspect of Ana Abyedh Poudrée is at first milky, like a doughnut soaked in tres leches, then super dry – almost tinder box dry – like the trail left by an incense stick or ash in the air after burning Palo Santo. It is this shifting contract between sharp and soft, doughy and dry, milky and powdery, that I find so appealing. It may not be everyone’s idea of an ideal white musk, but it comes close to mine.
Liam Grey
Though famously a dupe of Gris Charnel, I love this as a perfume in its own right – it is a bright, citrusy green fig leaf brewed in rubbery black tea, with the masculine prickle of cardamom and a cooling veil of icy iris milk straight from the fridge. Both aromatic and creamy, I feel like a lighter version of myself when I wear it. Slightly woodier than the original Gris Charnel and sweeter than Gris Charnel Extrait, it straddles a happy middle ground that is not so one or the other than you feel guilty for wearing a dupe.
Further, unlike Gris Charnel Extrait, which unspools into a messy, synthy woodsy affair upon reaching the four hour mark, Liam Grey holds on to its smooth quality until the bitter end. It smells like the milky masala chai I drink from a local coffee house. Perfumes like Liam Grey make me think someone at Lattafa has realized that not everything they turn out have to have that rubbery synth edge for a perfume to be beautiful and long-lasting. I would never spend BDK prices of a bottle of Gris Charnel, partially because I already own a scent in the same genre (Remember Me by Jovoy) and partially because I think only Caron has the right to charge over 300 euros for a genuine extrait (though I wouldn’t pay Caron prices for the state of Caron output these days). But I was and am happy to take a 25 euro gamble on a bottle of Liam. For me, it is a ridiculously high return on investment for a scent that gives me everything that the original does.
Ishq Al Shuyukh Gold
Ishq Al Shuyukh Gold is a thick welterweight of a perfume – a doorstopper actually – featuring a meaty, red, drippingly iodic saffron leather boot left to fester and ooze and impregnate a bowl of the heaviest vanilla cream imaginable. The pungency of the saffron is immense, with its burnt tire and bitter, metallic medicine aspects out on full display, all adding up to a rich, rubbery leather note that seems too raw and bloody to be put in the front window, but you feel the economic pressure to rush it out anyway.
The thick, custardy vanilla lapping at its raw, meaty edges is a dopamine rush that you can hear thundering at you a mile away, like the hot oatmeal pouring down the hill towards the villagers in The Girl and the Porridge Pot story. It is so dairy rich. Though a bit rough and scary at the start, the beauty of this scent is in the drydown, when everything smells like soft, buttery, but still a bit leathery, like a vanilla pod removed from its bath of cream and split open easily with the merest touch of pressure from your fingernail.
It is very similar to Vanagloria, without the fresh pineapple weirdness, which I guess makes it similar to YSL Babycat and Rosendo Mateu #5, but if I could get the 135 euros back that I spent on Vanagloria (Laboratorio Olfattivo), my favourite of this genre, and put 35 euros down on Ishq instead, then I would. Since they all traverse the same basic trajectory from a thick, tight knot of sticky resins, leather, and saffron to a smoother, more relaxed ‘black vanilla cream’ suede aroma, there is not much point in owning more than one of these exemplars. However, I am happy with keeping a bottle of Ishq in Africa and a bottle of Vanagloria in Europe. Separated by continents and whole economic markets, they each occupy a different plane of existence, like similarly sized planets in solar systems millions of light years away from one another.
The Bad
Photo by Niklas Kickl on Unsplash
Qaa’ed
I bought Qaa’ed for my husband in 2021 and all four of us have rued the day I did ever since. Taken in (and not for the last time, I bet) by all the mentions on Fragrantica of warm gingerbread or cardamom cookies, and conveniently ignoring all the reviews that mentioned how it smelled like a loud men’s aftershave, I imported it at some expense from Indian eBay, from whence it was dispatched – it seemed to me, given the seven weeks it took to arrive – on the back of manatees and elephants.
Exotic back story and all, you might say my expectations were high. One spray was enough to reveal the gravity of my mistake. Give it some time to ‘macerate’ they said, and that synthetic-smelling roar will die down to reveal the glories of a highly spiced, leathery, caramelized woody scent. Reader, it’s been three full years since this thing got shoved to the back of the sock drawer, and having pulled it out again just now, it is with a heavy heart that I inform you that Qaa’ed needs a full 36 months of aging to smell a mere 10% better than it did when you first opened the bottle.
Rather than tell you what’s ok about this scent (a short list indeed, and includes the bottle), I am going to tell you about what’s wrong with it. First of all, the combination of treacly, syrupy sweet notes over those brash ‘burnt wood’ aromachemicals make it smell like any generic designer scent that markets itself as ‘smoky’ or ‘oriental’ these days – anything that comes in a black bottle, basically – and is unfortunately close to the chemical marshmallow BBQ stench of By the Fireplace. The cardamom and other spice notes barely register against the burnt but radiant woody amber, so the gingerbread cookies remain trapped in your hopes and dreams rather than making it out there on your arm. Lastly, its spicy masculine leather notes take it beyond the outer limits of my personal gender stretchiness – I would no more wear this than I would Brut or Old Spice (but obviously, I am not you, so you do you).
Lastly – and yes, I know I already promised that the last point was ‘lastly’ but since my hatred of this knows no bounds, I shall continue – it contains a sulfurous chemical that smells like boiled cabbage or broccoli farts, which means it’s giving a little Hard Leather, another monstrosity, this time of the Norlimbanol sort.
Bade’e Al Oud Honor and Glory
A garish, synthetic-smelling nightmare of a fragrance that pairs a strung-out pineapple note over a depressingly Ambroxinated amber for a result that would be obnoxious in an Axe spray, let alone a personal fragrance. It brays sporty blue masculine in big neon letters, even though the billing is all crème brulée and lush, tropical, juicy pineapple.
And you know, I am not sure what it was about that description that made it sound so attractive to me in the first place. Possibly the worst thing you could find at the bottom of a bowl of crème brulée are chunks of pineapple. I mean, have you seen what too much pineapple does to your tongue? Just imagine what it will do to the soft, wobbly custard. Curdle city, baby,
Anyway, all I can smell is the dreadful screech of whatever woody amber they have stuffed into this thing, but I am sure that the people who hate this scent will blame it for being ‘too spicy’. Spicy, my ass. Spice is pleasantly nose-tickling, even at its most aromatic or fiery (chili, black pepper) and cannot be held responsible for the almost physically painful nostril sand-blasting effect of nasty, loud aromachemicals.
Someone, somewhere will bleat plaintively, but what about the turmeric? To which I say, what about the turmeric? Turmeric is the face flannel of Spices. Sure, it can boast of its brilliant ochre dyeing properties and its anti-inflammatory effects, but let’s get real, sensory-wise, it smells like licking the surface of your child’s first attempt at an un-Kilned bowl at a pottery class. It’s an off-brand saffron, or an even cheaper henna, with a dusty, astringent medicine feel. It is not going to set your tongue or nose on fire. No, that’ll be the Amberwood or whatever aromachemical accounts for Honor and Glory’s special flavor of screech. I see this scent clearly, and unfortunately, it is ug-leeee.
Bade’e Al Oud Oud for Glory
My father wears this, which surprises me, because his favorite perfumes are fresh, woody-citrusy vetivers – think Timbuktu, Terre d’Hermès, Eau Sauvage, and Quercus. I asked him about it, and he said that he only wears it at night when watching TV, so that he is not disturbing anyone but himself. ‘It’s a bit loud, alright,’ he admitted sheepishly. A bit loud? The Krakatoa Eruption was probably quieter. It is one of those perfumes that I have difficulty perceiving individual notes, obscured as they are by a noxious cloud of greyish, fuzzy Cilit Bang-like chemicals that bloom suddenly and violently, like the blast wave of an atomic bomb. People say they can smell leather, oud, and patchouli in this – I cannot. All I smell is harsh.
Khaltaat Al Arabia Royal Blends
This is another one of Lattafa’s super potent, Amberwood-powered spice bombs aimed squarely at being the loudest bish in the room. The tech bros will love this one, because like Bade’e Al Oud Honor and Glory, Soleil de Jeddah Mango Kiss, and Erba Pura, it is yet another attempt to make fruit butch. Now, I don’t know why fruit has to be turned inside out with woody ambers so strident they will strip sebum from your pores at a distance of five meters for them to be macho enough for the bros to wear, but pleasant they are not.
I feel the same way about Royal Blends as I do Erba Pura, which is to say, puzzled at what the pear or apple ever did to anyone to deserve being dipped into Windex and rolled around in cigarette ash until there’s enough grit on it to pass as manly. Men, why can’t your mangoes and apples just be soft, juicy, and sunny? Let fruit be fruit, not a cigar, or a glass of whiskey, or the whole darned library, or whatever other masculine trope they are throwing at the genre these days. I can smell Royal Blends on my clothes after two wash cycles, which is never a good sign, but God knows, maybe that’s what men want. I don’t know.
The Meh
Photo by Sinitta Leunen on Unsplash
Teriaq
From the few glowing reviews I’d seen on YouTube for this, I gather that people are hyping this one to the rafters almost entirely because it is by a ‘name perfumer’ – Quentin Bisch in this case – rather than the usual anonymous perfumer toiling behind the curtains at Lattafa HQ. I don’t have a problem with perfumers being named because the company shelled out big bucks to get them in, but I do have a problem with everyone assuming that the perfume is going to be amazing just because there is a ‘famous’ perfumer behind it.
The truth – and to be honest, this is something that most vloggers specializing in Middle Eastern cheapies or the pay-to-play, social influencer-paying brands like Parfums de Marley won’t realize – is that for every perfumer with one great perfume to their name, there will be fifty more perfumes in their portfolio that just keep the lights on for a brand somewhere or that came 4th or 5th in an in-house competition brief and were idling on a shelf (or notebook) for a few years until there was a chance to up-cycle it elsewhere. Quentin Bisch is no exception – he did Angel Muse, which I love, and Ganymede, which many people rate highly, with perhaps the latter being his sole claim to an original, groundbreaking piece of work. But on a day to day basis, what he is really good at is producing slightly generic-smelling, always syrupy sweet modern compositions that turn out to be commercial hit makers for companies like Gaultier and Parfums de Marley.
My guess is that much of the praise for Teriaq, therefore, comes from the name recognition of a perfumer associated with some of the most rip-roaringly popular feminine perfumes of the last ten years, like Delina (Parfums de Marly), all of the Le Belle perfumes (Gaultier), Fleur Narcotique (Ex Nihilo), and so on. The man turns everything he touches to gold, commercially speaking. Teriaq itself is an example of a perfumer phoning it in for a brand where they think nobody will notice, least of all the genre’s rather uncritical audience, for whom a bottle of perfume need only cost 30 euros for it to be proclaimed a work of genius.
Anyway, for what it’s worth, Teriaq smells like a mixture of Le Belle (Gaultier) and Pink Sugar (Aquolina), all burnt sugar caramel thickness, but with a lingeringly bitter, green edge that makes me think of immortelle and specifically of Afternoon of a Faun (Etat Libre d’Orange). There is also a prominent cis-jasmone-heavy material in here that smells like heady jasmine mixed with celery leaf, something that not everyone is going to like, but again, reminding me of the slight bitterness of the myrrh in perfumes like Alien Essence Absolue (Mugler) and indeed of La Belle Le Parfum (Gaultier), the latter penned by Bisch.
I would describe all this as a rough, green-brown syrupy smell that can’t decide whether it’s the corduroy and pipe vibe of a men’s immortelle chypre along the lines of Afternoon of a Faun or a femme caramel/burnt sugar tonka bomb with a lot of DNA in common with the thick, musky floral sugars of most of the Gaultier and Mugler feminine line up. For this reason, I think it borders on unwearable, which makes it interesting to see all of the reviews of people struggling to reconcile the lore of the famous perfumer with the over-sweetened, vegetal glop that is being served up here. It is not a bad perfume, but it is not a good one either.
Nebras
The hint of red berry combining with the vanilla gives the topnotes a sweet, anisic character, but with a cheap edge, like those Licorice Allsorts sweets that are a clear anise gel inside and covered with tiny fruity pebbles on the outside. What strikes me about Nebras from that point onwards is how nice but unremarkable it is. A sugary vanilla with a faintly dusty edge that might be cocoa but might also be practically anything else, the fruit and anise accents leaving only a trace of a black licorice gumminess. I almost admire its roundness and lack of edge, but even I – having bought a whole bottle of it – cannot pretend it is anything but a banal little Vanilla Fields body spray type of thing.
And actually, this is how I’m using Nebras, as a gentle layer of something vanilla-ish, set at the indoor voice levels of a scented body lotion, under sharper, bustier perfumes that need their edges smoothing out a little. I realize, of course, that I could achieve the same objective with the Yves Rocher Bourbon Vanilla body lotion, but that is super expensive and hard to find in Africa, so Nebras it is.
Ansaam Gold
I have never smelled Oriana by Parfums de Marly, after which this is supposedly modelled, but I can confirm that Ansaam Gold is in the same wheelhouse as Love, Don’t be Shy by Kilian, the OG of this particular scent DNA (very little being genuinely original in perfumery). If you like that sweet, orange blossom-scented marshmallow fluff kind of scent, then Ansaam Gold is precisely that and there is no real need to buy a niche variant for $200-300 more. I was going to add ‘unless you’re actively trying to avoid the garish-looking bottle of the Lattafa’ when I remembered that the Parfums de Marly bottles are equal in the eyesore stakes.
I don’t personally aspire to smelling like a fluffy, orange-y marshmallow but Ansaam Gold is not bad either. It is just a little too cute and girlish for it to be something I reach for more than once a year. I will say, however, that there is a powdery, woody nag champa note in here that is missing in the By Kilian scent, and that this is a marked improvement, as it tamps down the syrupy sweetness of that childish orange blossom note to a bearable degree.
Art of Arabia I
A very simple, fresh citrus scent with a touch of astringent black tea. The tannins and silvery, woody blast of bergamot lightly mark the scent out as masculine, though as there is nothing so particularly butch about it – no oakmoss, lavender, or coumarin – that a woman couldn’t pull it off. It doesn’t feel overly synthetic, even though it hovers close to the functional category. I just don’t find it very compelling. I bought a 20ml bottle of it for my son and though he likes it well enough, I think its main attraction to him is as a quick sprucer-upper in lieu of a shower.
Khamrah
I bought this for my son as part of his Christmas presents last year because he is 13 and gets all his perfume recommendations from Tik Tok (oh, the indignity). Angel’s Share by Kilian is hugely hyped on that channel and people suggested this as a dupe. Now, Khamrah is not a dupe of Angel’s Share and we were both smart enough to know it was the near identical bottle that created this impression rather than the scent itself, but ‘similar vibes’ was all he wanted.
Still, expectations properly tempered and all, we were both a little disappointed in Khamrah. It is sweet to an unpleasant extreme, like dried fruit macerated in sugar syrup for three months and then poured over one of those potent, spiky ambers that have more to do with Amberwood or Iso E Super than actual resin. The combination of sweet and synthy comes off as slightly cheapened – a feature emphasized by an ghostly coconut Glade note that haunts the drydown – and based on how little my son wears or talks about it, I can tell he also doesn’t think it measures up to the hype.
Perhaps I poisoned the well a little by giving him a travel bottle of Ambre Narguilé by Hermes while we were waiting for the Khamrah to arrive, because what else is Angel’s Share but a poor copy of Ambre Narguilé? I knew when his pupils expanded as he took his first sniff that Khamrah never stood a chance.
Yara
This is THE mall scent in East Africa. Ladies of all ages from pre-teen to matron seem to be wearing it. Having tried it multiple times, I can only guess that the desire to smell clean, fluffy, and feminine is universal among women who view perfume as an extension of their grooming ritual and not as the wild, yearning carpet ride into the belly of my imagination as I do. Seen through this lens, one could do much worse than Yara. It is a warm fruity-floral suffused with a rosy, marshmallowy musk that has no sharp corners to it at all and no delineation between one note and the next.
Some reviews say this smells like fluffy strawberry milk, the appeal of which I do understand, but this is very much a case of wishful thinking. I think the general idea here is good – pillowy, soft, clean – but either spring for something that goes full hog on it, like Teint de Neige, or spend the Yara money on the equally cheap but far more beautiful and fluffier Ana Abjedh Poudrée.
Oud Mood
Despite the name, this is not similar to Oud Satin Mood, nor is it supposed to be. Rather, it is a jammy, synthy rose-oud that would be unbearable to me were it not for the odd little shifts in its trajectory that keep me entertained. It starts out as a jammy rose with the regular Lattafa oud – a vile, rubbery synth that smells like tries covered in caramel and signed with a blowtorch – before suddenly shifting into a wet, sheepy labdanum that feels shockingly moldy.
But before I can begin to pigeonhole this, it morphs again, this time into what I can only describe as a dollop of strawberry-flavored marshmallow fluff. This odd accent, making its oddly late entry, develops into the most delicious scent of doll head I have ever smelled. It is the kind of scent I follow strange women into crowds for, trying to find out what it is. I don’t know why I love this incredibly sweet, dopey smell so much, the only explanation that makes sense to this Mitsouko-wearing, middle-aged woman being that it triggers a Proustian flashback to me playing with My Little Pony when I was a kid. This accord acts like a sugar high, complete with post-ingestion self-loathing and shame.
The last twist is that somewhere in the drydown it flips 180 degrees from a syrupy, dollhead-esque rose-oud into a gritty, benzoin-based amber that smells like speckles of brown sugar on a pie crust. It takes me a few wears until I realize that they have shoehorned the dregs of Raghba into the bones of this scent, making everything else stand atop its sturdy legs.
Listen, I don’t think Oud Mood is a particularly well-designed perfume. Neither is it objectively ‘good’ under any lens you might examine it under. It is loud and scratchy and obnoxious as heck for a solid 70% of its development trajectory. But I’m keeping it around on the off chance that some day, I myself am feeling loud and scratchy and obnoxious and need a fragrance that can stand shoulder to shoulder with me.
Source of Samples: I bought my bottles from various sources, among them Notino, eBay, Perfumes Wallet, Middle Eastern Perfumes Kenya, and the Arabic perfume stand in my local mall in Nairobi. A few samples were included with my orders for free, and several more I smelled at the mall without buying. I don’t receive PR from Lattafa.
Cover Image: Photo by Egor Myznik on Unsplash
Amber Balsamic Gold Herbal Incense opoponax Oriental Resins Review Single note exploration Spice Uncategorized
Empire des Indes by Oriza L. Legrand
17th May 2022
Oh, opoponax, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways. First, there’s the fact that, in its upper register at least, this is a resin that doesn’t know that it’s a resin at all. In fact, it wants to be a spice or a herb, but can’t decide which, which is why the first flash of opoponax lurches wildly between the metallic, sweaty sting of clove and the aromatic camphor of bay leaf. It’s like listening to a teenager’s voice breaking.
Then, there’s the ambery resinousness in its lower registers that smells like a rich toffee but also quite a bit like Disaronno, which gives it a boozy almond butter tonality that cracks the safe open a little to reveal how the drydowns of No. 5 (Chanel) and Shalimar (Guerlain) are actually constructed. There is even a hint of Johnson and Johnson’s Baby Powder or Baby Oil that lingers towards the very end. Now when people talk about wet wipes or nappies when it comes to either the Chanel or the Guerlain, I have an idea where that association is coming from. New level unlocked.
Lastly, the fact that the transition between the astringent spicy-herbal topnotes and the almond taffy basenotes is awkward as hell, which makes things interesting. Sometimes, this clash of cymbals produces an old fashioned bay rhum effect that makes me think of amber mixed up with Old Spice or Brut. There is a lingering soapiness in among all that almond butter richness that calls to mind shaving foam. Personally, I love this confusing mash up of balsamic sweetness and rinsing herbal sourness. You get the gold honey of a resin and the aromatic rigor of a barbershop fougère. What’s not to like?
I bought Empire des Indes (Oriza L. Legrand) blind because I’d heard that it was an opoponax perfume. I heard right. At first spray, I thought that perhaps I’d screwed myself because, you know, opoponax will opoponax, and is there really any point to owning something that repeats on you like a burp across your collection if you already own Imperial Opoponax (Les Nereides), Ligea la Sirena (Carthusia), and the Big Daddy of them all, Eau Lente (Diptyque)? Not to mention Jicky (Guerlain) and Bengale Rouge (Papillon Perfumery), no slouches in the opoponax department themselves.
But not to worry, because Empire des Indes, though it certainly possesses a strong opoponax character, has been dressed quite differently to these perfumes, and therefore occupies a different slot on my collection. The sweaty metal of opoponax’s clove topnotes are softened by a dusty cinnamon Nag Champa accord, which has the effect of puffing the perfume up and out into a sweet, ambered dust cloud that shifts softly around you as you move. It is something you can cuddle into. By comparison, Ligea la Sirena is more citrusy-hot with lemons, sour tea, and carnation, a jagged knife perfect for cutting through the heat, while Imperial Opoponax is shaving foam central before hitting its toffee stride much later on.
Empire des Indes probably comes closest in orbit to Bengale Rouge due to the shared emphasis on that spicy cinnamon and a rich ambery-balsamic tonality. They are both, it must be said, perfectly slottable into that one slot you likely have reserved for spicy ‘orientals’ whose primary function is to warm your bones (and emit a golden, balsamic sillage) when the weather is cold. But in terms of weight and ‘thicc-ness’, there is no competition – Bengale Rouge is a Two-Ton Tessie, its generous pours of honey and tonka bean keeping the resin in place like a weighted blanket. Empire des Indes is far lighter and more diaphanous, similar to the weight of something like Fêtes Persanes (MDCI Parfums), Black Cashmere (Donna Karan), or Theorema (Fendi).
But, of course, opoponax is not the only show in town (if it were, I’d recommend just going out and buying some opoponax). There are some really nice, interesting things happening in Empire des Indes that make this so much more. For one, ginger adds a savory, mealy texture to the cinnamony topnotes, creating a briefly musky, almost urinous twang that some will invariably interpret as Musc Ravageur-lite (ginger does something similar in Shams Oud by Memo). Sandalwood adds a gently peanutty milkiness that fades too quickly for my liking.
Once the spicy-herbal flash flare of the opoponax dies back a little, the scent breathes and stretches its limbs into that golden, toffee-ed resinousness (splashed here and there by Old Spice) that one expects from opoponax in general. But where Empire des Indes innovates is in its earthy shading of this ambery accord with the cocoa-ish dust of patchouli and what smells to me like the curried maple leaf richness of immortelle. (Neither of those notes are listed). These accents, coupled with the dusty nag champa, give the perfume a witchy, leaf-blown tenor that feels like something out of the Solstice Scents catalogue (Foxcroft, Inquisitor, or Manor Fire, for example, some of which feature a similarly indie ‘burning autumn leaves’ accord). Not headshop territory, exactly, but heading in that direction.
Or would had Empire des Indes lasted any longer than it does. The trajectory from top to bottom is regrettably short. At least those last tendrils of dusty nag champa seem to be standing in for what otherwise might be a white musk or something abrasive, like Iso E Super, i.e., it carries the perfume across the last mile without compromising any of its delicacy. Still, this is not a terribly rich or deep perfume. It floats in wisps and tendrils and drafts. Indeed, you might say that the only downside to Empire des Indes is its softness. But you know what? Like Fêtes Persanes, that is possibly what I like the most about it.
Source of sample: Sample? Baby, when it comes to opoponax, I buy the whole bottle. Sometimes even blind. I purchased my bottle directly from Oriza L. Legrand.
Cover Image: Photo by Sergey Norkov on Unsplash
Attars & CPOs Cult of Raw Materials Mukhallats Review Sandalwood Single note exploration The Attar Guide Uncategorized
The Attar Guide: Sandalwood Reviews P-S
28th March 2022
Hello fellow sandalwood freaks! Remember to read the introduction here and the sandalwood primer here. Also, Part I of the sandalwood reviews (0-M) here.
Precious Woods (April Aromatics)
Type: concentrated perfume oil
Precious Woods is a contender for the best woody perfume on the market today. Although natural perfumes can sometimes be muddy, this one has impressive scope. The top notes are dark and oily, almost pungent, with a full helping of aromatic fir balsam, pine, and the lactic sourness of sandalwood. It ain’t pretty, but it is real. As lung-filling as walking through a forest densely knotted with fir and cedarwood trees, the opening almost recreates the effect of the topnotes of Norne by Slumberhouse – while they do not smell alike, there is the same general sense of notes crowding in on you too thickly.
Soon, though, the initial tension dissipates. Through the camphorous murk comes a wisp of incense smoke, weaving in and out, cutting the density, and paring back the oily balsams until you see the real subject matter of the scent standing there unobscured, namely the richest cedar in existence. For much of the mid-section of Precious Woods, there is an almost equal dance between cedar and incense.
It smells richly spiced, slightly smoky, and muscular. I am reminded, whenever I wear this, of the discipline it must take to direct attention to one material, without feathering off into extraneous detailing or piling just one more thing on. If you have ever worn a perfume and lamented the perfumer’s inability to ‘leave well enough alone’, then try Precious Woods to see what curation smells like.
The best part of the scent is the aromatic, creamy brown sandalwood that rises up from the base. It has the same spiced gingerbread sweetness and dairy-rich mouthfeel as in Neela Vermeire’s first three fragrances or vintage Bois des Îles (Chanel), other sandalwood-rich scents. Precious Woods is admittedly an expensive choice for when you want a woody perfume, but if you really, really want a woody perfume, go straight in at the top end with Precious Woods and you won’t regret it.
The oil is also remarkable, but quite different from the eau de parfum. It opens with an oud-like note, which is to say wood that is a little leathery and sour. There is also a plasticky nuance to this topnote, like wood varnish or the terpenic whoosh from a newly-opened can of latex paint. Right behind this accord is the gluey, peanutty rawness of freshly-split lumber, pointing to the presence of sandalwood. But there is also quite a lot of cedarwood, its damp armpitty nuance reminding us of why so many perceive cedar as smelling a bit funky.
All the basic building blocks of the eau de parfum are present and correct in the oil, but the difference is that, in the oil version, they are all there at once, rather than unfolding gradually. Crucially, an oud-like note replaces the coniferous balsam opening of the original. With the fecal, coffee-ish properties of cedarwood on full display, the Precious Woods perfume oil initially smells quite like The Body Shop Sandalwood oil designed with higher quality materials and a much bigger budget.
Soon, however, the Precious Woods oil segues into a long mid-section that is roughly similar to that of the eau de parfum. Thanks to the patchouli, cistus, and buddha wood, the dark aridity of the cedarwood is fleshed out and thickened by nuances of whiskey, amber, and woodsmoke. This gives the wood a slightly sweeter, more relaxed character.
In the oil, the general impression is that of a log of wood fluffing out in anticipation of its serving of double-cream sandalwood. Does this arrive? Actually, no – or at least not to the extent it does in the original eau de parfum. If you want a more sandalwood-focused experience, therefore, choose the eau de parfum. If you are looking for a rich, smoky cedarwood experience, then the oil version of Precious Woods is the better option. Both are insanely good.
Pure Sandal (Al Haramain)
Type: concentrated perfume oil
The name must be one of the cheekiest pieces of misdirection in the business, but though it is neither pure nor sandal, Al Haramain’s Pure Sandal is a pleasing little thing. It at least makes a valiant effort to recreate something of the sweet-and-sour aspects of a Mysore oil using synthetic sandalwood molecules, which is more than can be said for many other oils with sandalwood in the name.
The first clue to its synthetic construction lies in the booming sillage of the perfume when first applied to the skin. It immediately fills the room with a loud woodiness in a way that no pure sandalwood oil does. Rich and sour at first, the scent eventually develops a slightly sweet, powdery finish that nonetheless remains fresh. Men could easily wear this. Pure Sandal is a reasonably pleasant attempt at a sandalwood aroma, one that, if you are into layering, will do a creditable job of lending simple rose oils or attars a ‘sandalwoody’ boost.
Apart from the obvious tomfoolery over the name, this is not a bad option for those who want a sandalwood fix but who find themselves on a tight budget. Personally, I would just adjust the name to read Al Haramain ‘Pure Sandal’ rather than Al Haramain Pure Sandal because those inverted commas convey a more honest message.
Photo by Abby Savage on Unsplash
Royal Parvati (Ava Luxe)
Type: concentrated perfume oil
Royal Parvati is Jicky (Guerlain) as seen through an indie sandalwood haze. The resemblance to civet-laden Guerlain classics is helped along by (I suspect) either a dollop of black-brown ambergris, with its intimate, halitosis-like funk, or a synthetic civet material.
The lime-peel brightness in the opening recreates with eerie accuracy the famous ‘curdled cream’ topnote of both Jicky and Shalimar. In the case of Jicky and Shalimar, it is the meeting of lemon and vanillin that prompts this effect. In Royal Parvati, it is likely the cream of the sandalwood interacting with the silvery, high-toned topnotes of the Peru balsam or orris root. It never fails to amaze me that the complex note interactions that makes a Jicky or a Shalimar so distinctive can be arrived at – whether accidentally or otherwise – by smashing other materials with broadly similar effects into each other at high velocity.
Over time, the filthy ambergris or civet swells up even further, impregnating every fiber of the creamy woods. Royal Parvati eventually settles on the aroma of split logs in an Indian sandalwood forest – humid and milky – but with the crotchy funk of a hot woodsman who has marked his territory by rubbing his nether regions into the grain of the wood. The result is a deeply musky, civety wood scent that gives you all the naughty bits of an unneutered Guerlain without weighing you down in baby powder. In my humble opinion, Royal Parvati is one of the true standouts of indie oil perfumery.
Sandal 100k (FeelOud)
Type: essential oil
Sandal 100k is distilled from the buried roots of old Santalum album trees harvested and cleared from land in Indonesia. Completely forgotten about, the rootstock of these noble old trees lay in the ground until the locals figured out there was precious oil in them there roots! Sandal 100k was distilled by Russian Adam of FeelOud, one of those oud pioneers who upped and left a comfortable, suburban life in the West to spend their lives distilling precious oils in the humid, fly-ridden jungles of the Far East, simply for the love of real oud and sandalwood oils.
To make the oil, the roots of old trees – all aged at least between eighty and a hundred years – were dug up, cleaned off, and set out to dry. The roots were then broken down into small shards, and finally, pulped into a sawdust-type mixture which was placed in the distilling pot. Technically, S. album roots enjoy the same sandalwood bragging rights as heartwood from a one hundred year old s. album tree because it is both the right species (S. album) and the right age.
Sandal 100k smells bright, greenish, and terpene-rich at the offset, with all the nutty, savory sourness characteristic of Santalum album perched just behind it. The green rootiness dies back quickly, allowing the salty, buttery sides of the oil to emerge. For the first part of the ride, therefore, the oil lingers in the aromatic, fresh category of Santalum album, but as time goes on, it reveals a rich, sweet nuttiness that qualifies it as the perfect sandalwood for everyday use.
Sandal (Al Shareef Oudh)
Type: essential oil
Sandal is a blend of Indian sandalwood (Santalum album) and Australian sandalwood (Santalum spiccatum), cleverly mixed to ensure that one fills out the gaps in the other. The Australian sandalwood adds a rugged, hearty aromatic body that gives the soft, pale, creamy Indian sandalwood a backbone, and the milkiness of the Indian sandalwood tones down the blunt, piney greenness of the Aussie stuff. The idea is carried off to perfection. It is sweet, creamy, and incensey in the Mysore fashion, but also nicely outdoorsy and fresh. The two oils complement each other very well, and neither dominates.
If you like the musky, armpitty feel of the cedar-sandalwood blend in Tam Dao EdP by Diptyque or the brusque creaminess of Wonderwood by Comme des Garcons, then know that Sandal by Al Shareef Oudh shares a similar aroma profile. It is sweet, nutty, and aromatic, but also blandly creamy – a perfect balance of the rough and the smooth. Unlike the commercial Diptyque fragrance, however, Sandal’s central accord is durable, meaning that it hits its stride and stays there for the entire day. Doubtless Sandal would not satisfy a Mysore purist, but as an everyday sandalwood wear, it is a great option.
Sandalwood (Nemat)
Type: concentrated perfume oil
The Nemat version of sandalwood is famous for being a good, hippy-style representation of what sandalwood smells like. However, to my nose, it smells like amyris or another wood oil with some creamy sandalwood synthetics thrown in for volume. It smells good but generic. The creamy loudness of the sandalwood synthetics masks a certain varnishy, pinesol tone to the underlying wood. The best one can say about it is that it develops a rather attractive raisin-like sweetness in the drydown.
Photo by Austin Wilcox on Unsplash
Sandalwood Spirit (Abdul Samad Al Qurashi)
Type: mukhallat
ASAQ’s Sandalwood is a lush, tropical version of sandalwood, its generously humid wood fleshed out by notes of coconut milk and flaked coconut. The faintly gluey nuances up top are markers of authenticity, as is the oil’s quietness. However, it would not surprise me to learn there was a synthetic smoother or two in the mix here, helping to create the perfectly rounded impression of what smells like expensive European sunscreen.
Soft, milky, with coconut cream notes dissolved in a clean, white musk trail, Sandalwood Spirit wears more like a finished perfume than an essential oil. It is quite powdery in the drydown, and even features a hint of rose hidden within its folds. It will win over anybody who prefers discreet smells over loud or pungent ones, even if that means making a few concessions on the purity front.
Photo by Sam Hojati on Unsplash
Santal Carmin (Universal Perfumes & Cosmetics)
Type: dupe, concentrated perfume oil
Santal Carmin by Atelier Cologne is a wonderful and slightly odd sandalwood fragrance that smells more like hot milk, Petit Beurre biscuits, and the inside of a new car than actual sandalwood. Its creaminess is slightly generic, featuring a paint-by-numbers porridge accord that one often experiences in more gourmandy sandalwoods. But it has its attractions too, such as the flash of something citric up top to lift the scent into the air, and that guilty-pleasure nursery pudding facet in the drydown.
The dupe smells just as chemically-engineered as the original and follows the same basic blueprint with regards to texture, structure, and development. The sweet saffron-laced milk-and-biscuit accord kicks in a touch earlier in the original, while a very tart lime topnote extends the impression of freshness for far longer in the dupe. The original is more creamily suede, whereas the dupe is more creamily pleather. But these are minor differences. If you enjoy Santal Carmin but don’t fancy the price tag (and who does?), then this dupe is an excellent substitute.
Santal Mysore (Abdes Salaam Attar)
Type: tincture
This sample is a tincture, not a distillation, so there is a blast of perfumer’s alcohol to contend with at the start. This makes sense, as Dominique Dubrana makes all-natural, spray-based perfumes, and thus makes all his tinctures by hand too. Experiencing a material like Mysore sandalwood through the medium of a tincture rather than an oil allows one to glimpse facets of the material that might escape notice in a pure oil. It is almost as if the tincturing liquid stretches out the space between the molecules, allowing us to see them more clearly in isolation.
The Santal Mysore from La Via del Profumo reveals a surprisingly floral nuance to the sandalwood, a mélange of rose and gardenia over a salted butter and cream version of the famed wood. It is savory and nutty, with a texture close to cream cheese. It is beautiful but ephemeral. I find myself applying it over and over to rewind to the moment where that gardenia bomb detonates.
Photo by Maude Frédérique Lavoie on Unsplash
Santal 33 (Le Labo)
Type: concentrated perfume oil
Famously the signature scent of thousands of hipsters in certain areas of Manhattan, Santal 33 by Le Labo has become a bit of a design cliché – the olfactory equivalent of the Barcelona chair or the man bun. But just because everyone is wearing it doesn’t make it a bad fragrance. It is maybe even a darned good fragrance, as long as you are able to park your expectations at the door.
For one thing, despite the name, Santal 33 is really a leather-focused scent, with a salty, green cucumberish quality that is almost aquatic. It opens with a powerful blast of chemical violet, salt, leather, and that aqueous herbal element, making me think of vetivers like Fleur de Sel by Miller Harris. But focusing too closely on the individual elements is of little use here because the total effect is so forceful that you just have to give yourself over for the ride. Santal 33 is intensely masculine: full of raw oily leather, cedar, and balsam. It makes me think of a lifestyle concept store – one of those cavernous, white empty studio spaces where they place a tangle of parched white driftwood in one corner and a red pleather couch in the other.
Only much later on does the typical aroma of Australian sandalwood makes it presence known, with its light green aroma of dried coconut husks and freshly-hewn cedar logs. In general, this is a dry, woody-leathery scent with a green, sea frond aspect, rather than the lactonic sandalwood its name seems to suggest. It smells slightly of books, the raw, harsh chemical breeze of salt and Iso E Super whitewashing the scent until the grain of newly-printed paper appears.
The perfume oil of Santal 33 is, for me, infinitely preferable to the eau de parfum. It smells immediately of the scent’s most vital elements, namely that tough, violety leather and green coconut, but with all the petrochemical harshness removed. If you like Santal 33 but are nervous of its chemical-driven loudness, then allow me to beckon you over to the perfume oil corner. Good stuff.
Santal Royale (Ensar Oud)
Type: essential oil
Unlike Santal Sultan below, Santal Royale is a pure Mysore oil, distilled from vintage stock (thirty to forty years old) of red Mysore heartwood. Also, in contrast to Sultan, which has been aging in the bottle since 2005, Santal Royale is a relatively young oil, having been produced in 2013. It is a very interesting experiment, therefore, to compare the two oils, seeing as one comes from non-Mysore s. album but has been aged for almost fifteen years, while the other comes from a vintage Mysore stock of wood but is a relative ‘young pup’ in the bottle.
And aroma-wise, there is a difference. Whereas aging has rendered the Sultan smooth and buttery, Santal Royale still retains the lively sparkle of freshly-cut wood. This is especially apparent in the topnotes, which are fresh and silvery, with hints of menthol, crushed peanut shells, and rubber. Above all, it is bright, sandalwood floodlit from all sides, little veins of sap and salt sparkling like diamonds in the grain of the wood.
There is zero greenness, and no camphor or pine. There is a hint of mint at the start, but the cushioned mintiness of a menthol cigarette more than fresh herb. The main characteristic defining the heart is a very salty, bright blond wood note. On his website, Ensar mentions that it possesses notes that could remind people variously of ambergris or musk. It does not remind me of deer musk at all, but I can see where the ambergris comparison comes in, in that they share a sparkling minerality characteristic of white ambergris.
It is not as dark or as velvety as Santal Sultan, but with its bright, tenacious ‘salty peanut shell’ aroma, Santal Royale probably comes across to people as more sandalwood-ish at its core. In the drydown, a sugared thread of incense crystals dances in and out of the savory, nutty aroma. Texture-wise, it is far more robust and tenacious than Santal Sultan and might even be described as invigorating. It has a lively, movement-filled presence on the skin.
Santal Sultan (Ensar Oud)
Type: essential oil
Santal Sultan proves that santalum album grown outside of the Mysore region can be every bit as luscious as anything grown in Mysore itself, providing that care is taken with the quality of the wood and the distillation process. When I say quality, I mean oil distilled from properly mature s. album heartwood or roots – over a hundred years old for preference – and by careful distillation, I mean someone who knows how to supplement elements that might be missing to make up the traditional Mysore flavor profile.
Santal Sultan is an oil that meets all these criteria. It is made from a distillation of a hundred-year-old roots of santalum album trees in Aceh, a semi-autonomous Indonesian region located on the northernmost tip of Sumatra – which takes care of the age issue. Then, the robust reddish-brown depth missing from the pale rooty oil was added back via a co-distillation of the Aceh roots with red heartwood from wild Tanzanian sandalwood trees, which lends the oil a rich, almost incensey depth. Taken together, the two woods create a true Mysore aroma. Now that is alchemy.
Note-wise, Santal Sultan opens with a smoky, rooty smell that recalls a mixture of orris butter, green wood, burning rubber, and leathery oud oil. There is an almost vaporous, solvent-like quality to the topnotes that risks getting you high if you sniff too closely. This collection of aromas, which might be loosely categorized as antiseptic, gives the oil a medicinal austerity that remains lightly present throughout.
The oil settles quickly thereafter into a classic Mysore profile: buttery, salty, savory-sweet, with a faint backbone of reddish, aromatic wood dust and the sort of ambery warmth associated with labdanum. It is rich and smooth, like a piece of wholemeal toast slathered with a soft salted butter and a pinch of cassonade. There is also a noticeable vein of spice running through the oil – nutmeg pulsed lightly with black pepper. For all its buttery, spicy, incensey richness, however, this oil is also very soft. This is the oil I would buy for meditation and yoga, were I constitutionally suited to any of those sitting-still-for-long-periods activities.
If I were to point a beginner in the direction of one oil that demonstrated – reliably – all the classic characteristics of a Mysore sandalwood oil, then Santal Sultan would be it. In the absence of Mysore-grown oils that have been properly matured, this oil is probably the best example of a Mysore-type sandalwood oil on the market today.
Photo by Max Griss on Unsplash
Serenity Sandalwood Oudh (NAVA)
Type: concentrated perfume oil
Company description: Beautifully raw and aged Sandalwood from India and Egypt with Fossilized Sandalwood all blended into a deep, smokey Indian Oudh with hints of our originally named: Arabian Oudh and Egyptian Temple Oudh (from the original ICONS series).
Setting aside the fact that sandalwood does not grow in Egypt and that fossilized sandalwood is not a material used in perfumery, Serenity Sandalwood Oudh smells neither like real sandalwood nor the fantasy kind. Rather, it follows almost to a T the lines of the idea put forth in Alkemia’s Arabesque, i.e., a creamy, woodsy amber with a moreish crystalized sugar finish. More crème brulée than wood, in other words.
Don’t get me wrong – Serenity Sandalwood Oudh smells absolutely delicious, and for those specifically looking for a sparkly, sugary ‘white’ amber (creamy rather than resinous), this will not disappoint. But if you are looking for an authentic Indian sandalwood aroma or a glimpse of the famed, er, Egyptian sandalwood? Look elsewhere. This is a pretty ambery-woody affair with an effervescent, powdery finish. Not that there is anything wrong with that, of course. It just does not do what it says on the tin.
Sondos (Sandal Rose) (Al Rehab)
Type: concentrated perfume oil
I would be shocked to discover that Sondos (otherwise known as Sandal Rose) contained any real sandalwood or indeed, any real rose. Nonetheless, every time I smell this cheap little perfume oil, my nose is fooled into thinking it is smelling a light, delicate Indian sandalwood kissed by a bright rose.
The sandalwood note is remarkable for its fineness, by which I mean that it does not contain any of the brutish, terpenic sourness of Australian sandalwood. It just smells soft, slightly golden, clear, and sweet-nutty. This points to the use of a synthetic sandalwood molecule such as Javanol or Ebanol in the mix somewhere. But really, when the effect is as pleasurable as this, who cares if the sandalwood is real or not? At this price, I certainly don’t.
The rose note has been well chosen too. Fresh but gently rounded, with nary a hint of harsh lemon or hotel soap, it exists purely to add an innocent flush to the cheeks of the sandalwood.
But be sure to inhale quickly, for this is an experience that lasts scarcely ten minutes before disappearing completely. A delight for rose and sandalwood lovers, you will forgive its short duration in exchange for its unassuming prettiness and shockingly low price.
Wild Mysore Sandalwood Sample (via Sultan Pasha)
Type: essential oil
This sample was provided to me as part of a larger sampler that included Sultan Pasha attars as well as samples of certain raw materials, such as oud and sandalwood. It is a vintage, wild Mysore sandalwood oil (exact age unknown), and, during my research, served as a reliable baseline for how Mysore should smell. The aroma profile of this sample is gentle, blond, with an olfactory range stretching from raw wood and lightly toasted peanut shells to a warm, dry-creamy aromatic aroma with some sourish, lactonic notes. It is the quietest of all the sandalwood oil samples I own. However, its shyness and delicacy are part of its charm.
About Me: A two-time Jasmine Award winner for excellence in perfume journalism, I write a blog (this one!) and have authored many guides, articles, and interviews for Basenotes. (My day-to-day work is in the scientific research for development world). Thanks to the generosity of friends and acquaintances in the perfume business, I have been privileged enough to smell the raw materials that go into perfumes and learn about the role they play in both Western and Eastern perfumery. Artisans have sent vials of the most precious materials on earth such as ambergris, deer musk, and oud. But I have also spent thousands of my own money, buying oud oils directly from artisans and tons of dodgy (and possibly illegal) stuff on eBay. In the reviews sections, I will always tell you where my sample came from and whether I paid for it or not.
Source of samples: I purchased samples from Ava Luxe, NAVA, Universal Perfumes & Cosmetics, Abdes Salaam Attar, Al Rehab, Nemat, Al Haramain, Sultan Pasha Attars, and Le Labo. The samples from Ensar Oud, FeelOud, Al Shareef Oudh, Abdul Samad Al Qurashi, and April Aromatics were sent to me free of charge either by the brands or a distributor.
Note on monetization: My blog is not monetized. But if you’d like to support my work or show appreciation for any of the content I put out, you can always buy me a coffee using the little buymeacoffee button. Thank you!
Cover Image: Custom-designed by Jim Morgan.
Independent Perfumery Leather Review Smoke Spicy Floral Uncategorized Woods
Hyde by Hiram Green
21st November 2018
Hyde by Hiram Green is an exercise in birch tar. Actually, it’s an exercise in how to do birch tar without swamping the structure in an overwhelming wall of BBQ smoke. The scent opens with the peculiarities of rectified birch tar on full display: the tarriness of melted gumboots brushed with the cooling tingle of wintergreen and the medicinal sting of TCP (Germolene). A pleasantly boozy warmth, a licorice-like chewiness, stirs underneath the surface.