Al Ta'if Rose Nakhb Al Arous
Abdul Samad Al Qurashi

I can say with complete confidence that I've never smelled pure rose oil before, and by pure, I mean an oil that comes from slowly distilling Taifi roses, mixing it with water to allow impurities to materialize and then syringing off the pure, clear oil off the water and putting it in a small bottle. Smelled up close, the oil smells surprisingly nothing like what you expect a rose to smell like - but this makes sense, because a rose is made up of over 500 different aroma compounds. But the two main 'flavor' constituents of rose are actually geraniol and citronellol - these smell sharply 'green' and sharply 'citric' respectively. And when I smell Al Ta'if Rose Nakhb Al Arous close up, I mostly smell a piercing lemony note and a lurid green note. These notes present so bright and acid, it is almost like you just peeled a citron. The smell is blindingly bright, sharp, thin, almost animalic in its spiciness and greenness. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet - but I'd wager good money that in a blind smelling test, most people would never guess rose, not at first at least.

Later on, maybe forty minutes later, the brightness fades and the first notes we collectively understand as 'rose' begin to coalesce on the skin - honey, lemon, geranium, pink and red petals, cinnamon - roses in perfumery are built using these materials, and you can smell hints of each building block here. But the trajectory is short, because this oil is so volatile it is absorbed into your bloodstream through your skin in about an hour.

I experimented with the oil, using it as people in the Middle East would do, which is to layer it on top of fixatives, such as white musk, oud, or amber. Layering it over the ASAQ Body Musk helped to extend the life of the oil by about another hour, but I felt it kind of dulled the sharp, piercing rosy lemon-ness of the first half hour too much. I layered it over one of the aged ouds in the sample pack - sorry, I can't remember which one now, but I suspect it was the Bin Khalid, and the results were gorgeous - just gorgeous. I finally got the real rose-oud combination as it is supposed to be, and not some pale, synthetic interpretation as dreamed up by Western niche perfume houses. The combination is animalic, potent, complex, and it definitely works - you can see why the combination would be popular. The rose brightens and sweetens the oud, and the oud adds darkness, woodiness, sometimes smoke, and definitively depth. Two very big thumbs up! The price is $1,200 per tola, which is costly, but then again, if you have wealth and want to invest in the best raw materials, then I don't think this can be bettered.