Aquilaria Blossom is an exciting new collaboration between Russian Adam of Areej le Doré and Taha Syed of Agar Aura, both oud artisan distillers and perfumers of repute in the oud and mukhallat community. Russian Adam is something of a pioneer for the oud community in that Areej Le Doré was the first brand to make a commercially successful breakthrough from pure oud distillation into the bigger market of niche spray perfumes. In doing so, he opened new doors for the rest of the oud artisan community.
And now it seems that Russian Adam is once again forging new market pathways both for his own brand and others, this time with a marketing strategy known as collaboration, a partnership-based strategy that expands the commercial reach of both partners, cements reputations, and deepens the customers’ feeling of engagement and authenticity associated with the brand. Areej le Doré’s first collab was with Sultan Pasha Attars on Civet de Nuit (review here).
For us consumers, the important thing is to understand what we are getting in terms of value added. How are the two styles of the two collab partners different, or similar? Why does a collab between them make sense, both for them as artisans and for us as the people who end up buying and wearing this perfume? For readers who are perhaps unfamiliar with the respective styles and signature ‘moves’ of Taha Syed and Russian Adam, let’s take a closer look at them individually before examining the end result of their collaboration, i.e., Aquilaria Blossom.
Taha Syed of Agar Aura is a famous artisan oud distiller, with a reputation roughly at the same level of Ensar Oud (they are fierce competitors). Though unfamiliar with his mixed media work, I have tested and reviewed two of his pure oud oils for my oud series here and here (I purchased both samples directly from Taha). The common thread I found in both ouds was that his style is deceptively clean and minimalist, eventually revealing very complex substrata.
But Taha is also famous for his support for the idea of using fractionated compounds of oud oil to ‘build’ a more complete or compelling aroma. In oud distillation, as in any essential oil distillation, the quality of the aroma of the compounds in the distillate varies according to many different factors (read here for more detail), one of which is the timeline at which the distillate is ‘pulled’ out from the still.
For example, in ylang, the distillate produced in the first hour of distillation is known as Extra, with the grades of First, Second, and Third following in sequential order. The descending order is generally thought to correspond to a descending quality, though lack of standardization in the essential oil distillation business makes this extremely difficult to verify and is often purely conjecture. I am not sure that fractioning is that precise or quantifiable a tool. But what it does allow for is a bit more room to play for the artisan who is distilling the oil.
The upshot is that at each stage (or ‘pull’) of the oud distillation process, the distillate possesses some characteristics that customers find desirable and some that are less so. The artisan’s job is to figure out how to amplify the desirable traits and weed out the less desirable ones. What Taha Syed is known for doing is separating out the oud distillate into individual compounds and then putting them back together in a way that fits with the idea he holds in his head. If the customers love the smoke and leather notes of a particular style of oud oil, but not the more sour, abrasive ones, Taha can separate them out and discard what he doesn’t need. A retrofitting of sorts[1]. Apparently, this is now a quite common approach in the pure oud distilling world.
Russian Adam, on the other hand, is probably best known for the Areej le Doré perfumes, many of which I have reviewed here on this blog. His perfume compositions tend to be baroque, retro-styled florientals that lean hard on rare raw materials (oud oil, real deer musk, genuine ambergris) but stop short of making them the entire point of the exercise. The result is often as pungent as its constituent raw materials, but you would never mistake it for a simple distillate; these are clearly perfumes.
Interestingly, his pure oud distillation work under the Feel Oud banner tends to be far more experimental. Read through my pure oud oil reviews (grouped and alphabetized here: 0-C, D-K, L-O, and P-Y) to see reviews of Russian Adam’s pure oud oils and you’ll see what I mean. From runny Brie to green curry oil and jasmine, his oud oils are perhaps the quirkiest and most playful I’ve seen in what can be a very po-faced genre.
So, without further waffling on, how does Aquilaria Blossom – as a collab between two oud artisans who also happen to be self-taught perfumers – fare both as a fragrance and as a representation of two quite different artistic styles?
Let me start by saying that Aquilaria Blossom surprised me by its lightness and its simplicity. Now, never were two words more guaranteed to make the Basenotes boys sweat than these, so let me clarify. When I say ‘light’, I mean that texturally, it wears as thinly and elegantly on the skin as an Hermès silk scarf (compared to, say, an Aran sweater). This isn’t the bulky ‘stacked to the rafters’ scent experience we are used to from Areej le Doré. It wears on the skin in the same way as Dehn Oud Ateeq (Abdul Samad Al Qurashi) does, which is to say a sheer but durable wash of scent on the skin.
And when I say ‘simplicity’, I mean that this isn’t a perfume that crowds in so many notes and accords that all you smell is a thick mud of absolutes. It remains legible, uncluttered – no squinting required to make out what it is that you’re smelling.
Don’t know about you guys, but those are both positives in my book. It certainly makes the scent easier to describe.
The TL;DR: Aquilaria Blossom is a fresh, spicy scent that pairs a juicy floral-tart citrus accord with a fine-grained, horsey leather (most likely the result of that ‘touch of oud’ promised in the notes list), bracketed by an ambrein-rich resinousness that seems to build from nowhere about six hours in.
The feature-length movie version: A one-two punch of a tarry citrus and a pop of (briefly) gamey oud opens the scent with a dramatic flourish, holding court in that vein for quite some time. The citrus accord, pithy with bergamot and aromatic-woody with yuzu, is bitter but also balmy, with a waxy perfumeyness that brings to mind orange blossom. If you’ve ever had those strange Japanese gummies that taste both citrusy and floral in the mouth (think Diptyque’s Oyedo), then you have an idea of what this smells like. For the record, this is the only even vaguely floral part of the scent, for me at least.
A note on the oud (or ouds) used. They are not specified and maybe not even the point. But I do wonder if Taha Sayed use compounds of different ouds at various points of the perfume’s composition to highlight an effect he wanted and discard the rest. For example, the briefly animalic pop of oud at the start might be a fractionated compound of a Hindi oil, because we get the spicy hay and leather notes of a Hindi but none of its depth or range. And while the faint undercurrent of sour berries and stale radiator dust that soon develops under the skin of this opening might point to a Cambodi, who really knows, because there sure ain’t any caramel.
Whatever it is, the main effect of oud is to start building a lightly gamey leather accord that stretches all the way from the top of the scent to its basenotes. The citrus notes eventually fall off, as they do, but when they do, you don’t lose any of the freshness initially created by them, largely because the leather that the oud whips up is so elegantly thin.
Ambergris sometimes adds this wonderfully silty, horsehair muskiness to a composition. Combined with the oud in Aquilaria Blossom, I find this produces the impression of being in a tack room, the air thick with the scent of saddles freshly taken off heated horseflesh. A touch of castoreum (beaver butt) adds to the soupy animal warmth. Yet, the doors of this putative tack room have been flung open to let the fresh smells of flowers and hay in from the fields. And maybe someone peeled an orange an hour ago, its volatile skin oils still staining the air.
‘Aquilaria Blossom’ is so-named for what both Taha Syed and Russian Adam imagined what a flower growing out of an Aquilaria tree might smell like. But despite the listed magnolia and neroli, the only floral touches I perceive are brief and upfront, worked into the perfumey bittersweetness of the citrus notes in the opening. Thankfully, the neroli doesn’t go soapy on me, or perhaps it does and all I end smelling is saddle soap, which is the only way I take my soap in perfumery anyway.
The ending really does come as a bit of a surprise. It shows up right when everything else is winding down, but unlike that one drunk guy who shows up at 3 am, it is most welcome. One by one, all the other notes seem to get siphoned off into a golden cloud of glittery resin particles, anchored by a rubbery licorice myrrh, and thickened only slightly by a subtle (thin) vanilla. The ending, like the rest of the scent, feels deliciously sheer. This is a scent where all the molecules are spread out and have ample room to breathe.
In the end, how much of Taha and how much of Russian Adam actually got into Aquilaria Blossom? I think the light, minimalistic structure is more Taha than Adam, but then I haven’t smelled any of Russian Adam’s fresher, more citrus-forward perfumes, like Chinese Oud (though his Limau Hijau under the Feel Oud banner is very citrus-forward) and I only know Taha’s work through his pure oud oils. All I can say with confidence is that Aquilaria Blossom has none of that heady, musky floriental thickness of body that we are used to in Areej Le Doré releases.
Is it possible that two oud greats came together and created….a freshie? Maybe! Russian Adam is an innovator and this is possibly him shaking things up. Aquilaria Blossom is fragrant and aromatic, woody and bright. It lingers on the skin and in the air but feels like no weight at all on the skin. But that’s not to say that its simplicity is, well, simple. I’m reminded of the line in Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” where he says “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then, I contradict myself. / I am large, I contain multitudes”. Aquilaria Blossom is relatively simple and straightforward. But it too contains multitudes. Multitudes of hay, ambergris, spice, citrus peel, and wood rot all tucked away neatly into one long thin line of leather.
Source of sample: A 2ml sample sent to me free of charge by Russian Adam (I paid customs).
Cover Image: Photo, my own, of Aquilaria Blossom sample next to piece of Wild Thai agarwood for scale. Please do not distribute, circulate or use this photo without my permission.
[1] For example, on the Agar Aura website, Taha describes his technique for Berkilau Hitam, a discontinued oil, as follows: ‘Berkilau Hitam is the pure isolated base-note fractions of the agarwood extract (and approximately 6 times higher in quality: Berkilau raw materials). This is pure wood, resin, and smoke. These are the same aromatic fractions that most people associate with actual burning agarwood, Fractions which are either missing altogether in many oud oils, or extracted using inferior distillation techniques. Scientifically speaking, this oil literally consists of only the heaviest, densest, richest aromatic compounds found in agarwood (read: darkest smelling)[1].’ Interesting, no?