There's a certain mindset that equates paying a premium price for perfumes with getting a fragrance that's loud, aggressive and impossible for anyone else within a twenty foot radius to ignore. It's the same kind of mindset that wants a tire screeching, revving, brightly shellacked Ferrari when shelling out a small fortune for an automobile -- if it's not going to belch out an exotic, attention grabbing roar when you stomp your foot on the gas, then you may as well save your money and get a Hyundai, right?
So if Bigger Stronger Faster is a personal requirement for your luxury purchases, you're not going to get much of a thrill out of Pure Oud By Kilian. The rest of you, however, will be screaming like a stadium full of fourteen year old girls at a Jonas Brothers concert.
Part of By Kilian's new Arabian Nights series, Pure Oud is a straight-up homage to the Middle Eastern Oud genre, and I'm happy to say that it's the most accomplished Western take on Oud that I've yet come across.
According to Oud Blog, Oud is a fragrance category, a type of smell rather than a specific ingredient: "So long as the fragrance is strong, and characterized by woody, leathery, or smoky scent notes (i.e. vaguely implies an 'Oudy' fragrance), it is Oud oil" -- and in this respect, By Kilian's Pure Oud is most definitely a leathery, smoky, woody, pure Oud.
Back in May, Kilian Hennessy stated that his Middle Eastern customers were the inspiration for his new series: "'They like scents that are more animalistic and Oriental, scents closer to their culture,' he said. The Paris-based perfumer said he only approved the formulas of Arabian Nights when they smelled correctly to people he knew from the Middle East."
I hate to admit that I groaned when I first read that Mr. Hennessy was jumping on the Oud bandwagon. "What is it with thin white Frenchmen and their insistence on butchering oud for the Western market?" I said. "Wasn't Le Labo Oud 27 punishment enough?" I spoke too hastily then, and for that I apologize. Yes, Le Labo Oud 27 is still awful, but Kilian Hennessy is one thin white Frenchman that didn't spoil the juice.
Dusty, spicy, woody and with a surprisingly attractive animal bite (there's no "barnyard" smell in Pure Oud -- it's all about warm fur and hot skin), Kilian's Pure Oud comes out of the bottle in a rush of bracing desert wind, then instantly tames itself to the surroundings.
There were moments during the day when I was convinced its deep, leathery purr had too-soon disappeared, then I would step into a smaller, more closely built space, like the building's elevator, and Pure Oud would be instantly, noticeably present once again when the doors closed and the air stopped moving.
Denyse Beaulieu at Grain de Musc writes: "Pure Oud, now, that's another story. It certainly smells like it ought to be the real stuff: smooth, velvety, barely sweetened by almond, warmed with a touch of tobacco by immortelle, dragged a little further into leather by a smidge of inky castoreum and, oh, yessssssssss: civet. This is the dark, musty lair of a sleek-furred beast, with metallic saffron alluding to the blood of the prey. It's purring, though."
And yes, I know, I can't stand the Immortelle note, I've said it a thousand time, but this is one time when Immortelle is all right by me, imbuing Pure Oud with a languishing, desiccated quality that partners spectacularly with the surrounding leather, fur and wood -- playing a balancing, smoothing role against the other more aggressive aspects to the mix.
Octavian Coifan at 1000 Fragrances has this to say about Pure Oud: "It's rather a dark ink (castoreum-vetiver like the Lalique perfume) with a special evolution in time until the very deep and long lasting notes of immortelle and flouve odorante. . . . It is indeed a very strange and precious oud note, nothing like Montale, very dry and smoky, with a very beautiful leather effect, not sweet and intoxicating."
The comparison to Lalique's Encre Noir is appropriate, and while Pure Oud most strongly resembles the smoke and soil EDP version of Encre Noir, Kilian takes the inky darkness one step further and several layers deeper . . . you know, if you like that kind of thing.
I see all those hands raised out there!
The packaging is stunning, and suits the fragrance like a custom fit glove. The usual Kilian glossy black box is now decorated for the Arabian series with a subtle, blue pattern, likely inspired by desert tribal art, and the square, glossy Kilian bottles have an added stripe of raised, matching patterns in black leather down each side. The face of the wood box is plated with a full, gleaming, gold plate engraved with Hennessy's signature K, while the bottle sports its own engraved face plate.
The useless but decidedly lovely silver key is still a part of the presentation, and the box arrives wrapped in a black velvet slip cover embossed with the Killian K -- the slip cover serves to protect the box's engraved face from scratches and discoloring, but I have to warn you, if you're a nut about keeping your fragrance packaging perfect, the glossy wood box and the gleaming metal face plate are going to keep you awake nights in a cold sweat. The face plate for my box is already scratched and I just barely glanced at it.
Pure Oud By Kilian isn't going to be for everyone. If you're a fan of the loud Montale ouds, or if you think Le Labo's Oud 27 is the camel's knees, then you'll probably take a sniff of Pure Oud and wonder why the hothouse flowers are all swooning.
Pure Oud is the first of five anticipated releases for the new Arabian Nights series. The second release, Back to Black: Aphrodisiac, will hit the shelves this coming September. Ms. Beaulieu is all aquiver over that one, too: "Back to Black is delectable, rich, and, yes, probably deserving of its "aphrodisiac" label. It soaks into skin as though you'd spent a lazy winter afternoon in a wooden yali by the Bosphorus, bathed in the fragrant smoke of the hookah."
Wow. She makes it sound so bad and yet so good at the same time . . .
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