Purple Haze Terzetto

Just thinking about it makes you wince. 

Three grams of Nha Trang LTD pools at the bottom of the bottle. Then three grams of Oud Royale 1982. Then Port Moresby… another three. By the time the last drop falls, nine grams of oud you’d normally measure by the swipe – distilled from agarwood you couldn’t replace today at any price – in just one bottle… before anything else has even gone in. 

Purple Haze Quartet is what happens when restraint goes out the window. Forget how little remains. Forget that every drop you just poured can never be distilled again – and let the finest aromas agarwood has ever given us have their way with the composition.

And somewhere in all that reckless extravagance, something became clear: these ouds leave their fingerprints on Purple Haze long before you reach anything approaching that dosage.

Nha Trang LTD has that effect. So does Oud Royale 1982. So does Port Moresby. Any one of them alone can rewire the whole Purple Haze spectrum until suddenly you dip your nose into this musky-but-purple fruitiness hovering somewhere between ripe flesh, violet leaf and old patchouli – raspberry, patchouli-like plum pulp, orris butter and precious flowers galore, all drenched in a sherbet of tongue-numbing kyara bitterness, thick slabs of old-school blue-purple Maroke resin and the aquatic blue-green resin of New Guinea, bleeding together into the same sticky purple syrup.

This edition is composed with those same ouds – letting them work their magic, only this time with a slightly saner indulgence than the Quartet’s nine-gram act of abandon, letting more of Purple Haze’s signature accord shine through the ouds. 

Nha Trang’s piercing kinamic zing cuts the sugar out of the raspberry even as Oud Royale 1982 makes it darker, thicker, more resinous; Port Moresby casts an eerie aquatic blue-green shimmer through both, so that something as dense as vintage orris butter can somehow smell creamy and zesty at the same time. The purple florals become almost obscenely saturated – Afghan rose steeped in incense, juhi smeared into musk, cassie tangled up with the dry-smoky earthiness of old Maroke – while blue lotus catches that New Guinea aquamarine and sends a narcotic coolness swimming through the composition.

If you thought Purple Haze couldn’t get any more addictive… get a whiff of this. 

Vintage orris loses its powder and turns to cream. Raspberry darkens into thick purple pulp. Vanilla stops smelling recognizably of vanilla and becomes a sticky glaze over old agarwood resin; violet leaf is stripped of its easy greenness and stained purple-black. Try pulling out the raspberry and you find orris. Follow the orris and it’s already stained with oud. The flowers bleed into musk; the musk tastes of bitter kinam; the kinam comes back dripping purple fruit. Purple Haze keeps folding back into itself until cause and effect become impossible to separate – you no longer know whether the oud is making the flowers smell purple, or the flowers are making the oud bloom.

Imagine vintage orris butter marinated in raspberries, battered into vintage oud and drenched in Tonkin musk – bitter purple kinam, kaleidoscopic old resin and narcotic blue-green agar running through the whole brew.

If you love Iris Ghalia, then this purple haze will make your head spin. 

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