Bain de Roses: Imphal

This composition is dictated entirely by materials of a caliber you won’t see come together anywhere else. At its core are vintage Ta’ifi roses from the 1980s, vintage (also almost half-a-century aged) Myitkyina oud, and the Oriscent Pattani – an exceptional, fully wild Thai oud whose quality and cost place it in a category of its own. This edition goes further by incorporating an aged, artisanal distillation of Imphal oud, selected specifically to reinforce and add its strikingly spicy rooibos oomph to bouquet of roses and oud that defines the perfume’s profile.

The concept was initially based on EO3, but has evolved into a new composition. Crucially, it contains a Ta’ifi rose that’s dense, diffusive, and this batch was extracted decades ago for a patron with no regard for cost. It doesn’t decorate the composition; it saturates it, sinking into mature Myitkyina oud that cannot be redistilled today. The Burmese oud provides depth and gravitas, while Pattani gives it a peerless oudy veneer – recognizably Thai, yet darker, super resinous, and more medicinal than any modern Thai ouds could wish to be. Distilled over a decade ago from fully resin-saturated trees, Pattani represents Thai oud at a level that has effectively disappeared.

Aged Imphal is an old, small-batch distillation that we’ve never made available the past ten years – dry, leathery, and quietly animalic – and not only is this is the only perfume that features such a distillation, but stars it next to Pattani and vintage Myitkyina.

Historic Tibetan, Tonkin, and Mongolian musks add diffusion and cohesion rather than showcasing their animalic bite, continuing the classical ghalia tradition. Old ambergris from a royal court binds the materials into a single body, while a restrained chord of black pepper, nutmeg, mandarin, rosewood, with touches of blackcurrant and helichrysum play with notes of black tea drenched in roses.

Bain de Roses isn’t a contemporary rose-oud frag designed to follow trends or metrics. It’s a historical-style composition built with aromatics that exist only in tiny amounts and cannot be reproduced – brought together in the only perfume of its kind.

A fragrance dripping in rare oud, drenched in…