Iris Noir: Maroke

The olive groves of the Jordan valley have been my adopted home for over a decade; the palm trees, the wadi waterfalls, the Sufis there.

But lately the tropical jungles have taken me prisoner and the blessed soil of Judah is a place I get to walk on less and less.

Iris Noir is dedicated to this land.

This is not a waltzing-down-the-Arabian-souq scent. It wasn’t inspired by spices and bukhoor. This is a New Yorker’s take on the Hashemite twilight that has beckoned his return year after year. The honeysuckle you smell on the way to the zawiya. The Melissa wafting though your kitchen window at sunset, the thyme and orange blossom and rosemary. Gaze at the galaxies lighting the caves of Petra. The Shaykh handing out swipes of jasmine; murids asking about that rose he used to wear. And the scent par excellence of Sufis: oud.

Ingredients include an in-house sandalwood melange, wild Cambodian oud, Japanese rose otto, a generous dose of orris butter, and, of course, much more. 

This edition also features a vintage, wild-harvest Maroke oud. I’m surprised it never occurred to me to incorporate this previously! The Maroke’s coco-tobacco-noir profile gives the iris heart a serious incense mood that gives the entire fragrance a regal oud allure.

In perfumery terms, a gentle exchange of dry and wet aromatics, top notes with the freshness of morning that takes you to noon, warm heart notes that lead you to sunset and base riffs that let you sit down and invoke the Name in the dead of night.

So, no. You won’t see a poster of a celebrity endorsing Iris Noir at the Duty Free. It’s not for the confident and independent men or women in those ads they tell you to be. It does not assert one’s masculinity or accentuate your femininity. It’s not a scent for your ego – it’s a genderless aroma that lets you step outside yourself and lets you see a world of beauty, an olfactory scentscape as real as the purple fig trees on the green hills as you drive towards Jerusalem.

It’s a scent of the river Jordan, the wadi waterfalls; the Sufis there.

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