Al Rehab Sultan Al Oud: Review

Charles H Pabst, Grand Canyon Light.

The afternoon light fires on every fragment of the sawdust that hangs in the air, air that is tinted rainbow by the high stained glass, scented with the fresh wood shavings and beeswax polish. Each footstep echoes, the sound of your breathing fills the room. You stand in this magnificently huge, empty space that is your new home and wonder where the couch goes…

If a single word were enough to sum up any fragrance, gentle would do it for Al Rehab Sultan Al Oud (SAO). This makes it definitively NOT your standard oudh based scent. Oudh has something of a reputation for being a very challenging perfumery ingredient. The extreme dirtiness of some mixtures or bitter medicinal nature of other can make Westerners baulk or find them inaccessible; it also tends to be an intense note. Even the Moth Woman had a moment on encountering her first medicinal oudh scent and she has a high tolerance for the strong, unusual and downright stinky end of perfumery. In fact, SAO’s very tameness may well come as a shock to those who have only experienced the harsher kinds of oud based scents and come to enjoy them. Thusly, if you have not tried oudh before, the Moth Woman STRONGLY recommends SAO as your first experience.

It opens gently with cedar and honey, sandalwood far in the background. It is very quiet, calming and delicate, evocative of standing in a cathedral, enjoying the silence. Right from the outset, it does not project much beyond and inch or so above skin level.  An hour in and paper daisies/wattle appear and take over. Two hours, back to cedar, lightly sweetened at this point. Three hours, it becomes a lovely sweet musk and sandalwood with a little cedar. Projection has neither increased nor decreased.

This is an odd feature of this scent. It opens at the volume that it remains throughout its lifespan. Stability of volume from front to back, in terms of projection, is a very rare quality.

Four hours and it's a little lighter but otherwise unchanged. Five hours and wood and musk dominate again. It lasts between seven and ten hours in total.

The Moth Woman recommends this scent for those days and situations where you just want or need something restrained, something that just makes YOU smell better but does not project. This one would make an ideal office scent. There is nothing sharp or intrusive about it. It is unlikely to trigger allergies and you would have to look hard to find someone that is offended by SAO. An additional bonus: this loveliness will only set you back $4-7!

Available for sale here.

Al Haramain Salma: Review

And she comes softly, veiled in pink, rukuku

Backstage unnerves you after closing, too echoing-empty. You only have a few minutes before the security guard comes back your way. The search for her dressing room is taking too long.  “Safa Singh, India's Girl Next Door in one show only…” all the posters say. You have been a fan since before anyone in the West had ever heard her name. Footsteps are coming from behind you. You locate the door. Luckily it is unlocked.

The dressing room is just as you would imagine a Victorian woman living in India would style her boudoir. As rumoured, it is pink but not the shade you were expecting—shocking fuschia—instead the kind of melancholy blue pink you see in lilacs, played out in a multiple of tones. A haze of strawberry vanilla incense smoke completes the sugary effect.

You flop down at Safa’s dressing table, read the names of her lipsticks and poke about in various boxes, trying on her jewellery. Then you notice it. A Louis Vuitton trunk, peeps out from under a settee, almost hidden by the dressing screen.  With a grunt, you drag it out. It takes a moment to figure out how to open the lid. Inside, there is a mass of black leather and brass. Eyes widening, you pull out a ball gag and cat o nine tails...

Al Haramain Salma (AHS) is something of a marvel. It is listed as being a tuberose fragrance. Other reviewers suggested this was a VERY different tuberose. They were correct. Against expectations, is not white flower scent. This thing is PINK and incense doused, sweet with rounded out edges, in a va, va, vhoom, May West feminine style.

As rumoured, AHS is also a very dirty girl. This is also the only perfume the Moth Woman can recall that includes four entirely different dirty/animalic notes. Miraculously, even with them, she is not in the least skanky.  

AHS opens with pink bubble gum, underneath it, a slight sour milk note and a dash of cumin. Once it warms, around the five-minute mark, truly massive sillage appear; it will fill the room. At this point, incense, night scented jessamine and a powdery aspect all emerge. Not a distinct element in itself, the powder creates the olfactory equivalent of viewing colours through a snowfall. Before the first hours ends, the duel between clean and dirty sweetness that is the hallmark of this fragrance commences with the arrival of a touch of soft indole. At about an hour, you get the sudden materialisation of what can only be described as a barbie head note. This evocative of childhood and Christmas for the Moth Woman, so she finds it nostalgic rather unpleasant. This is accompanied by a grape fanta accord. Two hours on and the bubble gum tuberose reappears, only hints of the incense linger. Three to four hours in and projection is only two inches from the skin now but the scent in still intense. The pure tuberose and incense dominate again but now haunted by a fourth animalic note, the somewhat infamous diaper pail/barnyard note. Do not be put off by this as it is subtle and just enhances the other elements. At the by 7-hour mark, it is very strong at skin level but no longer projecting. The animalic/dirty note is nearly equal to the tuberose and this remains unchanged till the scent vanishes, 12 to 24 hours later.

AHS is that big, bolshy and totally inappropriate friend you have, the one that tells dirty jokes at the wrong time and flirts with your grandfather, who is also it utterly dependable and blameless. It is nowhere as confronting as you would expect and quite cuddly in its own way. The one is a strong recommend.

Available on Ebay and here.

Al Rehab Aroosha: Review

The Bitterness of Greens, rukuku

You sit on the chamomile lawn, threading a daisy chain. Periodically you lean forward to pluck another bloom from the hedge.  Pressure from the movement releases waves of scent from the chamomile. The sunlight sparks off every leaf this morning, rendering the world vivid green dotted with white. Wind ruffles your hair, tussles all the foliage in the convent garden, bringing with it the scent of jasmine from a nearby bower, orange blossom and something else that you cannot identify, all smelling a little over-ripe. Another gust and something lands in your lap. A photo. You examine it. It is a little singed around the edges and it takes a moment for you recognise yourself. You have not seen this image in decades. Adrenalin rushes. Your gut turns. Looking around, you begin to tremble…

Al Rehab Aroosah (ARA) is Lush Lust if it were created by a madman whose main objective was to create something instantly dislikeable. If you quit ARA after the initial olfactory slap of this scent, you will be missing out. Brace yourself, power through for about five minutes and you meet the something totally different, unlike anything else you have ever encountered. To say ARA is a weird fragrance to a Western nose, is to vastly understate the situation but the Moth Woman suspects the strangeness maybe due to cultural differences rather than aesthetics. This will absolutely not be the fragrance that converts you to dirty florals but if you already love them, it will definitely spice up the affair.

The first five minutes consist of a bracing melange of crushed pyrethrum daisy-like notes, sugary sweetness, unnameable white flowers, jasmine, hints of musk and indole. After this, it smooths out, not losing the initial bitterness but pulling it back into the chorus. The acrid edge bolsters the indole and makes this brew something extraordinary and very original. As it evolves, there is some chamomile without the apple edge appears and something of the herb garden. A Fragrantica reviewer described ARA as smelling like India. The Moth Woman thinks this may be apt and imagines this scent must smell like the huge French marigold (Tagetes) garlands they sell at festivals.

An hour in and indolic jasmine, powder and hints of marigold petals dominate. By two hours, the volume has halved. Three hours and the mix becomes less jasmine dominant. The crushed daisy/marigold becomes more and more backgrounded. Caramel notes emerge and what, for want of a better descriptor, brittle sugar (think the crust on a fresh toffee apple). The inclusion of sweet elements in this scent is surprising but works well, in the same way pouring absinthe over a sugar cube makes the wormwood more palatable. At the four-hour mark, a sweet/sharp musk takes over but quietly, at skin level. The musk in question is as outstandingly different as the rest of this mix, like honey and pine buds. ARA is still perceptible more than 12hrs later.

The Moth Woman encountered a comment on the Basenotes forum a while back: “there are no bad smells only smells you don't like.” This applies here. ARA is polarising but rewards those who are prepared to give the different a try.

Available on eBay and from here.