Mélange Royale

This is the Sultan’s mélange – the fragrance he himself wore. The one made for him.

You’d expect there’d be a price difference between different aromatics. The costs of rose and oud are different, after all. But directly from the treasury, you pay as much for the Sultan’s rose-oud blends as you do for his pure oud – if not more…

All these decades later, we use SQ ingredients to compose our own semi-bespoke perfumes. It’s these rarities that add the incredible layer of depth and resinous soul to compositions like Mystical Lotus.

Yet, here we’re not talking SQ additions. This is the Sultan’s very own fully bespoke fragrance, as he wanted it and as he wore it.

It was literally made for him: The wood was sourced from various jungles – he had a special love for Myitkhina, Cambodian, Maroke, and Malaysian ouds – and these were harvested and then brought all the way to Oman, unprocessed.

Obviously, there was no budget, no price too high to pay for a Sultan. Certainly not when it comes to the greatest patron of olfaction in, quite probably, all of history. Sultan Qaboos bought only the sinkers, the triple king super harvests of the eighties and nineties. He brought the craziest agarwood out of Maroke a good decade before most even went in – Oud Royale was distilled long before most oud connoisseurs ever heard of a place called Maroke. And the freshest rose harvests automatically went to him — simply ask any old-timers in Ta’if today.

Those fat Burmese logs and old red Cambodian harvests and Malaysian insanities were gathered and brought to Oman to then be distilled in the Sultan’s own distillery.

That’s how much of a fraghead the Sultan was! He did what we all wish we could do. With the world at his bidding, he accomplished what everyone else could only dream of – even back then. Today? Dream as you may, where on Earth do you even find the agarwood they brought all the way to his distillery almost half a century ago… except from the Sultan’s own collection?

The idea of not distilling agarwood too far from where the tree was harvested doesn’t make sense to most distillers even today. I know this all too well because of the difficulties we face in doing just that.

Despite it all, the Sultan had it done even back then – because he wanted a specific smell. This smell.

Melange Royale is not an attempt to re-capture or re-imagine the aromas from the 80s and 90s. This is not our rendition of what Sultan Qaboos might have worn and liked. This is those trees. Those roses. That bespoke, in-house recipe. Distilled, not locally at the nearest distillery, but in the Sultan’s private distillery halfway around the world.

As someone who loves oud, you know by now how hard it is to find pure ones. All the junk you had to sift through to find the good ones. How long it took to find the great ones. After spending half my life pursuing what the Sultan himself once pursued, I…… I respect what he accomplished immensely. I’m blown away by what he achieved and that we can today share in the heritage he kept alive and be handed the keys to a time portal.

Customer Reviews:

The Pinnacle of Perfumerie, the ghalia of ghalias.

—David C. / USA

Melange Royale is a little bit shy, I think it may be aged quite a long time, especially compared to the newly formulated Ensars. Under that façade of niceness is an extraordinarily complex and unique ghalia. The perfumer is a genius and has produced an accord that I’ve never experienced elsewhere. It doesn’t have the WOW factor or Mélange Privee although there is certainly some MP in it, but I also don’t think they are comparable. MP is an example of the finest rose/oud but MR is an example of one of the finest composed perfumes in the world. Also, Sultan Leather Ghalia is actually quite similar, comparing the two you can feel they share same ghalia backbone and get a feel for where SLG might be headed given a decade or two. Anyways, MR has two sides, it’s a nice accord but it’s also a perfume nerd’s paradise.

—David C. / New Zealand

REPLY:

David took the words out of my mouth. I also thought MR was a humble perfume on my first three wearings. But further wearings proved to me that the oud contains secrets that are revealed with patience and attention. It tests my lung capacity because I keep finding more facets as I maniacally inhale until I go lightheaded. The initial rose blast is a velvety dark cherry note that is so palpable I can feel it squishing under my teeth, reeling me into the quiet oud’s corridors of darkness, which house a full spectrum of colors in shadows. MP took me a while to appreciate too, since I didn’t like the umami/savory aspect to it. MR has much less of that. MR benefits from accompaniment with a contrasting oil on the other arm, a little easy to go blind to otherwise.

—Hamid S. / USA

Dark cherry rose seamlessly entangled with a sweet, luscious, deep oud.

—Hamid S. / USA

Customer Reviews:

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