Purple Kinam x Kinam Extreme

Spend enough time with kinam on a heater and it starts making unreasonable demands of you. You want that bitter, creamy pull in the iris. That cool medicinal bite running through the flowers. You start looking at bottles you’d sworn to leave alone.

At first, you only open them to remind yourself. A swipe of one, a little of another. Then you smell the perfume again.

And now you can smell what you want to do to it.

That’s when putting the caps back on becomes a problem.

Purple Kinam was already a fairly unreasonable undertaking. Getting that Oriscent character into a spray takes considerably more than diluting a phenomenal oil and hoping the alcohol knows what to do with it. You have to compose around the smell until the flowers, the fruit, the entire perfume begins to speak its language.

So you’ve got peppery kewda glazed in vintage Myitkyina oud, violet and French iris from the 1950s, with Juhi and blue waterlily pouring their heady sweetness through the powdery cream. Raspberry and strawberry catch the light; Isfahani and Turkish rose open into the buttery richness of Rose de Mai. Mimosa and rice lend their pollen-soft, milky warmth before black tea and patchouli pull you towards the earth.

And underneath? Purple Kinam, Yunnan and Myitkyina oud, with tobacco, mushroom, vetiver and cedarwood. Ambergris, Mongolian musk, and our Royal Tonkin infusion in rare Sinensis. Violet leaf, cassie, ruh gulab… a whole garden caught in the gravity of that purple oud.

You could leave it there. You probably should.

But you’ve still got those bottles open.

Terengganu.

Sinking-grade Malaysian malaccensis, distilled decades ago. The sort of oud whose flowers seem to have grown inside the wood.

Violet threads through cool herbs and dense resin. There’s a dry medicinal edge, a little numbing spice, then a creamy floral softness that draws you closer. Age has given the whole thing an extraordinary smoothness without taking away its strange, arresting character.

Now imagine that violet running through the perfume’s violet. That cool green edge finding the kewda, the iris, the leaves beneath the roses.

Then Pahang.

Another old Malaysian oud, with the density of sinking-grade wood and the clarity of fine incense. Decades of maturation have polished its edges around a deeply resinous heart.

Its character moves between blue lotus, lily and violet, earthy woods and a supple leathery warmth. A fine kinamic shimmer keeps appearing through the heavier resin. Just as you settle into its floral side, something darker draws your attention.

Put that alongside the blue waterlily and old French iris, and you can see why I reached for it.

Pahang gives their softness weight. Its earthy depth reaches into the patchouli, vetiver and mushroom, while its blue floral character carries the perfume’s purple further into the woods.

With three grams each – six grams total – per 30ml, you’ve about to experience a much deeper shade of purple.

Terengganu brings the cool, herbaceous violet. Pahang brings the blue floral richness and resinous depth. Together, they draw out different sides of a perfume already saturated with purple fruit, flowers and oud.

An iris note leads you into old wood. A violet turns medicinal, then creamy. The berries catch against the darker resin, their sweetness suddenly more vivid. You return for one detail and find another waiting beneath it.

Try picking it apart. Follow the rose into the resin, the iris into the coolness, the sweet edge of a berry into something you could swear was rising off an oud heater. Before long, you’ve forgotten which ingredient you were chasing.

There’s only that voluptuous purple smell, opening further every time you return to it.

Now you know why we couldn’t put the caps back on.