Monster Projection & Heavenly Grace

HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS

This weekend, I was invited to drop by the London residence of the Qatari royal family. His Highness had received the Melange Privee SQ, Royal Taifi, and a few of the special oils we have from the royal collection in Oman, and he had written a letter he was keen for me to receive. Or so I was given to understand.

To my surprise, what I was presented with was a box with an antique crystal flacon. Proper vintage crystal from at least a hundred years ago, which upon opening I found to smell eerily similar to both the Melange Privee SQ and Sultan Leather Ghalia.

The note inside the box explained it all: This was the Qatari edition of what I had given him from our Oman collection.

To my great surprise, the style and quality were pretty much on par with what I had from Sultan Qaboos. I was also presented with a box of bukhoor which the Shaykh’s great grandmother had inherited from her ancestors, the original royals of Qatar.

I smelled them side by side. I put the Qatari Ghalia on one hand and took a spritz of Oud Royale on the other, and again, I was struck by the similarity. It’s as if the same hands had crafted both Oud Royale and this antique ghalia from another era.

Making such perfumes requires not only a certain skill, and of course the finest ingredients on Earth – it requires first and foremost a certain ethos, a philosophy that the perfumer adheres to whereby we ended up with the same smell – from the ghalia of Sultan Qaboos to the Royal Qatari Ghalia, and then to SLG and Oud Royale. Different hands in different eras had worked with obviously comparable ingredients to produce what is essentially the same fragrance. Not only were they similar in quality and aroma but also the style of perfumery employed was pretty much one and the same.

I took all this as a sign.

ELEGANT MONSTERS

Hold a piece of sinking Mysore sandalwood from the 1970s. Flip it around a few times, feel it, study it… Smell it.

Then smell the oil distilled from it. Its delectable, creamy aroma – and one with plenty of benefits above and beyond just being a ‘good smell’.

For ages, monks have burnt it as incense. They built their monasteries out of sandalwood not because it smells great, but because that smell induces a certain state on the psyche…

Why scent churches with frankincense? The scent is surely a part of it but inhaling the scent also calms the mind, purifies your thoughts, and makes you feel at peace.

The world’s best oud oils and finest cuts of kinam are first and foremost used as medicine for numerous ailments. The aroma is secondary, a ‘side effect’.

The same can’t be said for most of what goes into today’s perfumes. As with any art, people have different styles and tastes – but also different priorities.

My ethos, as EO, is to give you the most delectable and elegant aromatics in your bottle. The only caveat being that ‘elegance’ and ‘monster projection’ do not belong in the same sentence: They’re antitheses of each other.

Yet for most folks, perfume is defined by, judged by, ranked by, and appraised on the basis of this thing called ‘projection’.

If you live in a neighborhood lined with jasmine or honeysuckle, or any of the world’s most beautiful smelling flowers, you know that you don’t always smell them. It’s like they’re muted. Then there are times when you walk past and you’re pleasantly surprised by gentle whiffs of heaven.

Let’s go back to that sinking Mysore… Does the smell project across the room? 

Have you ever peeled frankincense direct from a tree and put it in your mouth? Did you get a headache from it? Did it taste like a toxin? Quite the opposite – you could taste the healing properties.

Has anyone from across the street ever waved and shouted at you, “Hey, I love that Blue Lotus you’re wearing!”

Why are these such revered scents when they don’t have ‘monster projection’? And why, as soon as monster projection steps on stage, are they nowhere to be smelled?

For aficionados of olfaction, it’s always about the scent. What it does to you. How it makes you feel instead of how you hope it will make others feel about you.

There are climate, altitude, air density, humidity, your chemistry, location, diet, mood, time, and a hundred other factors that interact with these smells. Summer nights and cool winter afternoons and sandy shores and pine-lined lakes all contribute, beautify, enhance, interact with these scents themselves and with the effects they may have – the memories they imprint.

Whip out any of the banned nitro musks or other ‘monster sillage’ aromachemicals by the shore at Lake Tahoe and they smell… intrusive. Unnatural, even abhorrent. They smell the same everywhere, all the time. Neither skin chemistry nor climate can affect them. Like the plastic waste they share their provenance with, they cannot be broken down.

This always seems like fake news to all the ‘performance’ junkies who have never experienced artisanal aromatics.

When I’ve got no perfumed ‘chemotherapy’ to offer them they complain that Sultan Qaboos’ own collection of the finest ouds ever distilled, blended with vintage Mysore sandalwood, antique Taifi rose, tuberose, jasmine, and blue lotus is…… just ‘marketing’. Reason? They don’t project like the household cleaner aromatics they’re used to.

They grumble about how the precious extracts which in their natural form don’t ‘project’ across a football field don’t project off their skin, and that the rarest aromatics on Earth cost a little more than mass-produced petrochemicals.

DITCH THE MONKS & EMPTY THE CHURCHES

When the lush aroma of vintage Mysore sandalwood, the exquisite beauty of Taifi rose, the healing scent of frankincense, the layers upon layers of single-source oud oil, the evanescent magic of narcissus or the night-time reveal of jasmine get reduced to this thing called ‘monster projection’ – what are you supposed to do?

I’ll tell you: pour those extracts into chemicals that are designed to be smelled a mile away. What these chemicals smell like is secondary to how strong they project. As long as they project, we’re good – even if you’d rather be sprayed by a skunk than put them on your skin. As long as they project……

But here’s the catch. Theoretically, some of these are meant to ‘carry’ other scents, say jasmine, like a magic carpet and fly them across the street and around the concert hall to be smelled by everyone. But full-spectrum aromatics don’t like to be jerked around. They’re heavy and dense, packed with flavor, and can’t just be whisked up and thrown around. 

Just take oud or vetiver, which are so molecularly dense (100+ distinct components) – how do you expect them all to be sucked up and projected intact by a magical chemical? That’s why companies strip these fragrances down to their bones and leave only the isolates. These are easier to carry; easier to ‘project’.

The result?

Sandalwood monks wouldn’t care for and frankincense that’s useless to a priest. Oud that smells like it does in all the ‘oud perfumes’ out there – nothing like artisanal oud oil.

The notes that project are mostly the projectors themselves – they’re not the notes you actually want to smell.

It’s very easy for me to create a perfume that’ll blast your neighbors’ nose off and linger for all of next week. I can’t think of an easier task or one that’s cheaper to pull off. And I’m well aware that it’s exactly such a monstrosity that would get the most likes from the widest audience…

I’m not here to get likes or a wide audience. If that was my goal, I would have enrolled myself in the ‘monster projection’ business a long time ago.

OG SUPREMACY

Many folks wish that scents like Chypre Sultan and Notes From Underground didn’t exist. Rather, they want us to keep regurgitating the old OGs from 2018, be it No 1, No 2, or Iris Ghalia.

The irony is that when we launched the original EO1 most of the folks who bought a bottle went on to moan about how performance was ‘mediocre’. Now those same folks say those editions had the monster sillage and projection, and the problem is the new EO1, EO2, and Iris Ghalia.

The beauty of it is that EO2 Kashmir was made with the exact same ingredients as the EO2 OG. The only difference is that the musk component this time was Kashmiri and not Siberian.

But this is nothing new. The minute a label changes over at Serge Lutens, nostalgia kicks in and everyone with a screen name starts kicking up dust reminiscing about the beauty of all the OGs, their incomparable performance, and the rarity of ingredients. Freddy Malle has been through the same thing. Amouage, Chanel, Creed, and every perfumer in the book: No one is spared from the love of the OG guerrillas.

LAB ANIMALS

You can talk for hours about why they hold such misconceptions, from nose blindness to what they are actually comparing… Memories? Third-party decants? Bottles that have aged two to three years compared to a new edition?

Scent has a funny way of working with memory in that you don’t remember the scent itself but rather your living moments while experiencing that scent. Moments of existence, recorded in a smell. And as the poet said, ‘O death in life, the days that are no more!’

What these people bemoan are their own treasured days and moments which were written in spritzes coming out of a certain type of bottle. And now that bottle is no more because the label looks different, or it doesn’t come in leather, or with a hand-written sticker.

If you compare a life lived with one unlived, as a rule the life you’ve lived will be dearer to you than the one you didn’t. That’s why your street is the best street to have grown up on, and your own bed is the best in the world, and grandma’s food tastes better than anything Jiro or Nobu can cook up.

I bet you when a new EO collection comes out – be it in a year or six – people are going to point to the EO gold editions and say, “Wow, that EO1 Assam was beast-mode compared to the new stuff.”

It happens to me, too. The original Crime & Punishment didn’t perform great on my skin. It’s one of few fragrances that I become anosmic to after about 10-15 minutes. Comparatively speaking, the new C&P is proper ‘beast mode’ on my skin. It envelops me in a cloud and will follow me around throughout my wear. It will make its presence known to me at every turn.

If we were lab animals, I wouldn’t blame you for not having the same experience. But because I wasn’t made in a lab – and neither were you – I don’t expect that the same user will have exactly the same experience with every single perfume. You can have a different experience with the same perfume a day apart. From the morning to the afternoon. One mood to another. How much more for fresh editions compared to memories experienced years ago?

If I weren’t 100% sure of the superiority of the latest Iris Ghalia to the OG, I would have simply remade the OG again the way I did EO2 Kashmir. What do castoreum, hyraceum and muskrat cost for me to not include them inside your bottle? They’re at arm’s length and they’re not the costliest of aromatics. If I thought they would enhance the perfume, why wouldn’t I put them in and bask in the glory of the OG?

If I didn’t think EO2 Kashmir competes with Private Blend itself at half the price, instead of EO2 you’d find Private Blend on the website.

MOMENTS OF HEAVENLY GRACE

Why is it that when it comes to other sensory experiences, the quality of the experience is of utmost importance, and not the volume?

When you go to a top Michelin-starred French or Japanese restaurant, do you look at the ingredients of the dish and the quality of the ingredients, or whether you’re able to supersize it for an extra 50 cents?

In terms of my personal ethos, let me say that I couldn’t care less if an oil lasted 3 hours on the skin or 13. I look at the impact it has on me during the time that it does last, and the wholesomeness and beauty of the fragrance, irrespective of longevity.

This is a fact of life. Walk past the jasmine blossoms or honeysuckle all you want, the ecstasy of the experience lasts only moments. Visit a rose garden. You’re in bliss only so long as you’re inhaling directly from a rosebud, not a second longer.

I find that ultimate beauty is inversely related to the longevity of the experience. The greater and more sublime something is, the more delicate, subtle, soft, and understated it is – and therefore fleeting.

This is also why the most exalted scent of all – Kinam – only lasts for as long as you keep the low-temp electric heater right under your nostrils and inhale – not a second longer – or an inch farther. Crank up the heat to fill the room with it and you lose the Kinam experience altogether. What you end up with is the vulgar aroma of smoke and charred wood.

It is true, skunk is also natural, and it can last for months, but then look at what the scent is like in and of itself, how it ranks on the chic and debonair scale, and the reason it was created… namely to repel, not attract.

Elegance and projection are negatively correlated. As a rule, the cruder something is, the louder the projection and sillage.

That’s why the most delicate notes are the top notes, and they’re the first to fade off the skin.

If beauty was in patchouli and labdanum, they’d be top notes – they wouldn’t be base notes. Even with oud, which is a base note overall, the most soul-stirring phase of the aroma is within the first minute or two. An oud is often judged by the first couple of seconds on skin – not the way it smells eight hours later.

Which oud smells better an hour in than it did the first minute or two? Unless you’re talking about (again) a highly unnatural modification – human-induced – and a crime committed against that oud by turning it into a slab of rotten cheese through lactic microbial fermentation.

Would you rather smell Oud Sultani in the first minute of development, or the way it smells 4 hours in?

This is a fact: The most delicate notes are the most fleeting.

It even applies to distilling oud. You’ve heard of different ‘fractions’ collected during distillation. These fractions get ranked by degrees of delicacy, the first fractions being the most discreet, evanescent, with beautiful top notes unraveling at 120 miles per second – while the mid-to-last fractions turn more and more woody-smokey until, taken to the extreme, the final fraction gives you the smell of burnt wood.

To be continued…