Royal Amber AA Blend
Abdul Samad Al Qurashi

A very complex and interesting perfume. As with most concentrated perfume oils from Arabia, it doesn't have the traditional top-down notes pyramid that we are used to with Western alcohol-based spray perfumes. Instead, the notes appear as a thick blanket of scent when you first dab it on, and then they spread out and reveal the basic facets of the scent, which you go on smelling until the oil evaporates completely. Often these oils go on subdued, and you feel tempted to keep adding more drops - but this is a rookie's mistake! Body heat intensifies and warms the notes so that they become ever more radiant.

Royal Amber is primarily an ambergris fragrance oil, so I went into this expecting something animalic, and that is exactly what I got. But also, so much more. It is unabashedly medicinal at first, and specifically, it smells of iodine or some other disinfectant. Iodine is present in both disinfectant and sea water, and since this is based on ambergris, it makes sense that I am smelling iodine. It's quite pungent, and not altogether pleasant, calling to mind the last time I smelt iodine in this concentration, naked and strapped down to a gurney for a c-section, with some goofy doctor sploshing a bucket of rust-red iodine over my nether regions.

It gets better (it would want to). While the iodine doesn't ever completely disappear, it is joined by the more attractive facets of natural ambergris, which is to say, notes of salt, marsh, and sweet marine air. I am not sure what grade of ambergris is used in Royal Amber, but perhaps it's a low grade one, because after a protracted period of salt, it begins to smell sweeter and tarrier, and I have read that the lower grades of ambergris can smell like melting tar. But the smell is very pleasant, sticky, resin-y, sweet, and almost leathery. It is animalic, with a light skankiness that may come from the combination of salt and leathery resin. Two things about it at this stage come to mind: it smells very close to something I have smelled before in the Slumberhouse line up, although I can't think whether it is Sova or Vikt (something about the combination of sweet, sticky resins and animalic, leathery notes), and it strikes me that labdanum could be employed in the composition there somewhere - sticky, brown, leathery, sweet. It's not listed, but I would be surprised if this was purely ambergris anyway.