The Composition
One rose, kept in shadow.
Read from the top down. The rose arrives first and cool; the oud waits a step beneath it, kept in shadow; the amber lies lowest, holding both to the skin. Three materials, each scarce enough to cap the edition - set here as a descent.
Heart · May harvest · Isparta
Rose
From an isolated triploid lineage that flowers for a single week in May. The petals are cut between five and nine in the morning, then distilled the same day to keep the green facet intact. Roughly two and a half thousand kilograms yield a kilo of essence - and it is in the dilution that the rose, here, learns to stay cool.
Heart · Wild-fermented · Assam
Oud
Fewer than one Aquilaria tree in ten produces resin, and only after years of wound and fungal infection. The agarwood is rested in water for fourteen days and distilled slowly over five to seven more. One hundred kilograms of chips return roughly twenty millilitres of oil - held back in the heart, so it is felt more than named.
Base · Labdanum · Andalusia
Amber
Labdanum is combed from the flanks of goats that have grazed the cistus shrub - a method codified in Minoan Crete and unchanged since. Macerated with vanilla absolute and a measured trace of ambroxan for six to twenty-four months, it becomes the warm, resinous floor on which the rose and oud are set.