Blue Wave: Kalbar

This bespoke edition features what is, to this day, the bluest oud I’ve ever smelled and one of the most precious ouds ever distilled. I can hardly believe that it’s been seventeen years since we made it. As I’ll explain below, I unknowingly undersold an irreplaceable gem, so I jumped at the chance to buy it back some years after it was sold out…

If you could imagine holding your hands over a gently sizzling Brunei chip, you’d be amazed to find that it smells nothing like Kalbar 3000.

You’ll encounter an incomparable floral note which is seldom met with in the scent of burning oud chips. Its tangy, zesty top-notes are alive with a vibrancy and oomph non-existent in contemporary oud oils.

Unlike inert resin contained in oud wood, distilled oud oil has the ability to mature and age and attain a depth surpassing the scent of lifeless chips. That is the beauty of artisanal distillation. In this little bottle, you smell the very soul of the tree. 

And not just any tree…

Had we not recklessly ground the precious Bruneian agarwood and distilled this oil, you would have had the chance to own a handsome collection of Brunei kinam chunks. Not only does the same caliber wood we crushed up now sell for many-fold more (a kilo costs an added zero more today, running into the tens of thousands of dollars for a single kilogram), a sizable portion of the batch that went into the boiler was a fusion of chips from Brunei kinam producing trees, and what later emerged as Brunei kinam itself. 

Blue Wave is a bespoke perfume rendering of Jamaican Ambergris Attar that showcases the smell of raw ambergris and how it transforms its co-stars, with pure ambergris tincture as the carrier. 

The cornerstone of Blue Wave is the exquisite grey ambergris stowed away in our Royal patron’s personal collection for decades. These stones, plus an extra precious batch of the Sultan’s own amber-infused Oud……

A delicacy of a pure oud hovering over your hand with an aura of ambergris glowing around it, and waves of jambu frangi-jasmine sweetness oozing all over. All with a splash of fine Georgian rose otto to add its diffusive lift and lend an air of elegance to Jamaican Ambergris’ boozy Caribbean, rum-sweet profile.

Perfumers would like to have their ambergris tinctures be at least a few months old. If the infusion sat for a year – great!

Now, imagine what would happen if your ambergris went into an attar at the dawn of the Reagan administration, sat in the dark for forty years in royal treasury…… and you turn that attar into a star feature of your perfume.

The oceanic, sandy ambergris veneer is present all the time. If you jump right into smelling a fresh spritz, you’ll probably smell only ambergris; it’s that dense. A split second later, the rest of the aromatics catch up and the show kicks off.

I love what ambergris does to jasmine. In perfumery, jasmine is often quite a dense heart note, beautiful but not one that jumps at you. But here it’s like the spotlight brings the jasmine to life, invigorated by the oaky, sagey sweetness of jambu resin, frangipani and vanilla.

I must say, this is a hard fragrance to note-pick. The scent is tightly wound, and while the ambergris element is palpable, the composition is so unusual you’re experiencing a unique scent afresh; one fizzing with the lush blue Brunei bliss in a pool of ambergris, as it adds the deep blue blast of resin, toned by the sandy dry beach tone of olde grey amber.