Crime & Punishment

Crime & Punishment is pepper-spicy right from the start, tampered by the sweetness of raspberry fused with frankincense and ylang-ylang that boasts the added umami of blue lotus’ buttery warmth, all riding a chariot of decades-old Royal Tonkin Musk.

Just like agarwood has Kinam and the rose world has Royal Taifi, musk has Tonkin.

The funny thing is both kinam and Tonkin musk originate in Vietnam, and each represents the pinnacle of their aromatic class. Tonkin musk is the rarest musk in the world. For years now, it’s practically impossible to find genuine Tonkin pods, and it has turned into the Holy Grail of all things musk. If you’ve searched for pods, you know that the dealers themselves are searching for the fabled Tonkin pods…

Rising through the Tonkin, a raspberry sweetness emerges, already admixed with the musk-morphed blue lotus that creates this strange post-modern chypre.

Mimosa and coffee mingled with rose and jasmine all vape through a prism of sandalwood and musk to form a steady tone that lasts for hours.

Top Notes:

Ginger, Coriander, Peach, Fir, Pepper, Blue Cypress

Heart Notes:

Ylang Ylang, Mimosa, Jasmine

Coffee, Petitgrain, Austrian Rose, Raspberry

Blue Lotus, Frangipani

Base Notes:

Sultan Qaboos’ Sandalwood Oil

Hojari Frankincense, Vintage Maroke Oud

Wild Cambodian Oud

Fixatives and Carriers:

Sultan Qaboos’ Vintage Tonkin Musk

80s Mysore Sandalwood

There are 15+ ingredients not listed here, nor are the ones listed ones I specifically want to highlight. There are extracts in here that are rarer and as expensive as the most precious of them, which for proprietary reasons are not listed—but are certainly smelled.

Most of the ouds, sandalwood oils, musks, and tinctures in here are our own painstaking productions, while many of the ingredients were sourced in person to check for quality.

You might find out what these ingredients are worth (fresh Siberian Musk sells for ~$30-45,000 a kilo, for example). But finding the ingredients in here at all—that’s another question.

The only reason you and I even have access to Tonkin musk is because our beloved Sultan Qaboos and those before have stowed away these precious pods for centuries.

We aren’t talking about just Tonkin musk. These are the sappiest, stickiest musk pods you can imagine. It’s like working with powdered molasses. The pods are literally one ball of musk putty—you can’t tell front from the back if not for a rogue hair, and you’re unsure if the scalpel cut the skin or if there is even any skin at all. This is old, old musk, so potent your neighbors can smell it.

That’s what this edition of Crime & Punishment comes steeped in. And that’s just the beginning.

The previous Crime & Punishment included Tanzanian Osyris tincture, which I decided not to use this time. Instead, the sandalwood dimension got cracked open to the max with the addition of not just Mysore granules from the 70s and 80s, tinctured in-house, but Sultan Qaboos’ very own collection of sandalwood oil acquired directly from the royal palace in Oman.

And I don’t mean we added just a sprinkle for the baraka. Three different batches were dunked into this edition, drowned into a cocktail of Tonkin musk oozing with vintage Mysore. This should be selling for many times the asking price—and you’d be getting literally 100 times the aromatic depth compared to perfumes that sell for double that!

I mention this and highlight the prices above to show that it’s unreasonable to demand that perfume with such precious components should be sold for ‘cheap’. You’ll earn more selling these oils neat, so this is not about profiteering through my perfumes.

Once you’ve spent your days and nights and years deep diving the depths of an aromatic ocean, when you’ve passed the point of nosebleeds and olfactory coma, do you relish the extravagance of such a perfume. Some, probably most, who merely keep track of scent fashion won’t understand perfume like this. They’d be let down like Bieber fans are when they first hear the 9th Symphony’s overture, or Miles’ Blue.

Noir. Intense. Not because the labels say so, but because there’s more musk in your bottle than in all the niche and luxury perfume shelves of the world combined. More oud and amber and coffee and cedar drenched in black tea than any noir celebrity poster will ever let your nose feast on, or any bootlegger can fake.

So, enjoy a pheromonal spritz that lets raw Tonkin musk bathed in the finest jasmines on Earth wake up a long-dormant naked attraction—not just carnal, but silage that also commands power and prestige… because fragrance once possessed such force—before musc got stripped of its K, and amber lost its gris.

The leather pouches come exclusively with the 50ml Pure Parfum edition, while the 30ml Pure Parfum offers our new golden plaque edition.