Sultan Black Rose: Hindi Sauvage

Pick ‘em early, pick ‘em cold.

That’s the golden rule at harvest – catch the rose before the sun does. Pluck the petals just before dawn, while they’re still holding their breath in the chill of night. And then – straight to the still!

It’s wild to think roses have bloomed for over 35 million years, and we’ve been cultivating their scent for at least 5,000. And yet, this… this is the first time you’ll smell rose this noir.

White roses shine bright, ‘innocent’ even, while red and pink play the game of love, of romance and seduction…

As for Black?

This is what happens when red bulbs bleed crimson and white exhales encens. When you inject oud into those silky petals and blackify the pretty petite. Stain the bloom black. When you’re chasing something of midnight’s noir – that hour when the soil breathes richer, the air cuts cleaner, and flowers grow bold. And the oud? Strong.

While perfumers reach for two varieties of rose (damascena and centifolia), this composition carries FIVE.

Not to be named.
Not to be counted.

Because this quintet doesn’t bloom alone…

The fragrance rises like a cloud of dark agar incense – resinous, smoldering – carrying the burnished sweetness of tobacco, dried slow over cedarwood. Beneath it, patchouli breathes its fresh earth, while black pepper and clove slice through the haze with a fiery bite, sparkling against the oud-drenched air.

While oakwood typically gives you a raw, dare I say ‘unrefined’ base, Bourbon vanilla oleoresin coupled with beeswax and a hint of fig smoothes its rough edges. Together, they also prep the base to be drenched in 30-years-aged Malaccensis…

You might catch flickers of labdanum, of saffron, of black tea and coffee, mushroom and helichrysum, fir and frangipani. But none of them shout at you – because they anchor the two titans at the core: Tigerwood 1991 & Suviranda (Suriranka’s near-identical twin)…

Where other roses smell soft and crowd-pleasing, Sultan Black Rose is born of the earth – nourished by vetiver, oakmoss, all rooted in all that Oud al-Tigri. 

Suviranda is an incense-grade Sri Lankan distillation we completed seven years ago, and it’s been beautifully aging since. You may have noticed that we’ve discontinued selling our Sri Lankan ouds due to how much more difficult (and costly!) it would be to distill them now…

Having this oud (and Tigerwood 1991, for that matter) in here actually put us in a bit of a pickle:

We’ve been on the verge of releasing Sultan Black Rose several times, so it has been sitting ready for a long time – the fact that Tigerwood 1991 is even in here should tell you that. And it was composed with a certain price bracket in mind – having this perfume at this price ignores the replacement cost of both ouds. 

A proper Tigerwood-rose quintet… laced with wild, aged artisanal Walla Patta bubbling inside – you’ve basically got yourself a Tigerwood Ghalia here.

Quite literally, because no EO is complete without either musk or ambergris. In this case, both.

Then, in addition to musk & ambergris, the carrier also contains both Borneo and Cambodian oud resin, you know… just in case the scent wasn’t drenched in that dark floral West Malaysian gaharu profile already! 

And in addition to TW91 and Suviranda, this edition also contains a gram of Hindi Sauvage per 30ml, which adds a feral, pheromonal rawness to the composition.

Sultan Black Rose doesn’t flirt with the charm of rose petals or the sugary sway of mass appeal. Instead, it shows off the force of a rose bouquet blooming from a slab of Tigerwood dipped in Walla’s mimosa cool, cast into a shadowed spritz that’s black rose beautiful.

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