Lily Gris: Purple Sultani

Iris is one of my many obsessions. But those who know me know the love I have for lilies.

The challenge is that while iris offers you an actual extract to work with, lily – much like gardenia – is a subject of great craft and imagination.

And imagination is where the perfumer truly abides.

It’s easy to put out a scent pyramid that reads like a million bucks, but to evoke gardenias out of jasmine and tuberose, to craft the perfect ambergris accord or to give sandalwood the heft and volume of rose – these are different matters altogether.

There are two types of lilies in perfumery. One of them is the woodland lily-of-the-valley.

The other is my great love, famously presented to you in avant-garde self-destructive fashion in compositions like Mystical Lotus and Blue Kalbar.

But while Mystical Lotus was full-on blue lotus, the secret to this composition was to strip the blue lotus of its blue and turn it toward the valley – this requires the same olfactory feat that mutes the purple facets of iris and turns them white.

Here, the hedonistic carnality of the blue butteriness of the water lily must sacrifice itself to give life to its unattainable terrestrial counterpart – the docile, ever-flirtatious, never-attainable lily of the valley.

A rendezvous where that inimitable beauty of the valley’s ethereal grace and fleetingness melts into the narcotic buttery accord of blue, also known as nymphaea caerulea (only the most beautiful aromatic could be named nymph of the waters).

This meeting of blue and blanc gives you the Lily – but what about the Gris?

Ancient Egyptians couldn’t resist the narcotic aphrodisiacal quality of blue water lilies, and neither could I.

As a perfumer, you start to wonder: Civet and orange, cumin and musk, oud and rose, the tantalizing touch of a lily and… what?

In Yemen, ambergris is consumed for sexuality. It’s heated and infused into teas and drank for… you know what.

So, what could be more apt (and rapt!) than to let our nymphs escape the pond and freely bathe in a sensual pool of sunshine, sea salt, and iodine!

If you own Jamaican Ambergris and/or Ottoman Ambergris, it is high time you add Lily Gris to your ambergris curriculum.

All three feature heavy doses of agarwood, which in each case leaves a thick trail of oud spirited by vintage ambergris. Yet, each couldn’t smell more different from the other. The trio is a fascinating and blissfully enjoyable olfactory journey into the world of oud and ambergris. And now, of course… lily!

If lily and ambergris were not the weak spot of this perfumer, I would have called this my Japanese plum blossom incense installment, in line with Iris Blanc and Yamanashi.

This edition dips that incense in drops of glistening bubbles that pop open to ooze out the finest oud you can wish to smell.

And this time, the oud is purple.

Purple Sultani follows in an exquisite lineage of purple sinking kinamic kodo bliss, the likes of Brunei Kynam and Kannan Koh. Here it arrives as Purple Mélange – my in-house chord of Purple Sultani, Terengganu, and King Super – ouds most collectors would lock away as heirloom distillations.

This is the very same Purple Mélange I used to create the sold-out leather edition of Jamaican Ambergris that people still email us about. If you know what those ouds did there, it’s high time you smell what they do to Lily Gris.

When it came to deciding which oud to grace this Lily Gris with, I barely had to think about it. Purple Mélange. What could be better? Which oud could make the lilies pop and make the gris fly over your skin and rain down purple K better than a marriage of super-king sinking legends?

Every 50 ml of this edition contains three full grams of Purple Mélange – a lavishness that makes no sense on paper, given how sparingly oud like this is usually used. Three grams of irreplaceable vintage legends that let you smell the scent of super-king, sinking agarwood distilled decades ago from Malay and Brunei-grade slabs that no longer exist, and aged long enough to go proper purple – dense, resin-saturated, iris-toned, and piercing in that unmistakable kinamic way. Oud of this kind does not exist anywhere else. #Only@EO

At this concentration, that’s not a subtle hint of oud. The mélange injects a deep, resinous oud spine directly into the ambergris, letting the sandy, dry beach facets of the old grey amber diffuse through mature purple oud rather than synthetics or smoke tricks. On skin, the effect is immediate: a pure oud presence hovering close, wrapped in the glowing halo of ambergris that has always defined Lily Gris. The lily-of-the-valley heart and its blue-lotus carnality lend their controlled sweetness without softening the structure, while a measured splash of rose otto lifts the diffusion and sharpens the profile. Purple Mélange doesn’t decorate Lily Gris… it seeps through and turns the whole brew purple.

Smell Lily Gris closely and you discover that this isn’t only a special place between the pond and the ocean, but that those delicate lilies are donned in the plummy facets of kneaded Japanese incense. Beachcombed white juxtaposed with royal vault vintage grey punctuated by Japanese plum and a zen aesthetic throughout.

The Japanese aesthetic is one of complication in simplicity. Overstatement via understatement.

With this in mind, imagine you’re attending a kodo sitting and those plummy facets of the incense slowly get fractured through a prism of mauve Purple Sultani resin and pale beachcombed white to create a pristine periwinkle.

Imagine those sweet indigo notes dipped into a pond of sinking-grade Malay and Brunei super-king that give lift to the ambergris dancing with blue nymphs of unmistakable purity, all of which – not so coincidentally – give birth to the perfect plum blossom neriko accord…

If you want a lily ghalia, this one is not for you. Between the sweet purple repleteness of Purple Rain and the animalic roar of an EO musk, Lily Gris is a scent of immaculate sophistication, elegance, and total zen.

Is Lily Gris so singular so as for it to be the only lily-themed ambergris in all of perfumery, kind of like Iris Ghalia is the only iris-centric musk? Or will this become a trend?

I wouldn’t be able to tell you because I’m in a field of lilies and the only thing to follow me here is the gentle breeze from the coast carrying upon it the salty savor of the ocean, the tide rolling in purple at my feet.

Composition: Purple Sultani · Terengganu · King Super (all sinking-grade oud) · Ambergris · Khmer Musk · Civet · Blue Lotus · Rose · Ylang Extra · Jasmine Tea · Orange Blossom · Frangipani · Saffron · Apple · Tobacco · Myrrh · Raw Crassna Resin · Asian Styrax · Blue Cypress · Sandalwood · Borneo Agarwood Hydrosol

Review of Previous Editions…