Via del Profumo

Kit of perfumery bases

pic credit: Abdessalaam Attar

My long-time friend (we’ve never met but corresponded for twenty years) Dominique Dubrana, aka Abdessalaam Attar, happened to mention recently that he had put together for a client a kit of seven perfumery bases embodying classic perfume structures. I immediately suggested to him to make this available on his website, and he promptly did. He also sent me the kit, and suggests its components can be used as fragrances in themselves, or in various combinations. I agree, but for me the main use is as a basic tenet of perfume culture, a calibration device that can be used to reset one’s nose both to quality (DD uses mostly naturals from high-quality suppliers) and to the much-abused basic phyla of fragrance.

His Chypre, for example is the real Coty-grade thing, and smells great. Bergamot, oakmoss and labdanum are all there, present and correct. It will make you wonder what on earth some of the current so-called chypres are talking about. The Citrus is exactly what an eau de cologne is meant to be, i.e. orange flower, lemon oil, bergamot and a touch of grapefruit. His Fougère harks back to the original Royale, though perhaps a little softer, with tonka bean instead of synthetic coumarin, and oakmoss. The Amber is more of a personal interpretation of this massive fragrance territory, with less of a vanillic note than usual and more cinnamon. The Spicy is very much DD’s invention, a wonderful accord of black pepper, cardamom and rosemary. The Floral is a solidly beautiful composition of the usual suspects, i.e. jasmine, ylang, and rose. The Leather is the oddest of the lot, a tobacco-castoreum-styrax accord that does smell bitter and leathery but for me also strikingly evokes the smell of the wrinkled, wizened small black olives of Greece.

I could not resist making my own private Déclaration (Cartier) by layering Citrus and Spice and am now strutting around like an impostor Jean-Claude Elléna. There’s clearly a lot of combinatorial fun to be had with these bases. The only downside is that if you happen to hit a great accord using two or three of them, chances are it will be hard to reproduce it exactly and you may end up spending the rest of your life looking for that Lost Chord. I do not often mention prices except, as was the case for Cherry Bliss (£12), they are the clincher. Same here: Dubrana sells the kit for a ridiculously low €90, which in the context of modern perfumery is an insane bargain.