The newest houses lean resinous: labdanum, clove, frankincense

Across everything added to the library in the last 45 days, five notes appear more often than any others: labdanum, ambergris, clove, frankincense and cardamom. Nine houses arrived in that window, eight of them on 13 September, and the shared vocabulary is resinous and spiced rather than sweet. That is worth examining before anyone files it under autumn.

What the five notes have in common

Four of the five sit in two families: amber and resin (labdanum, ambergris), and smoke and incense (frankincense). Clove and cardamom are the spices. Not one of them is a sugar note.

Labdanum is the sticky, slightly leathery resin from rockrose that gives most classic ambers their dark edge. Frankincense is drier and more lifted, closer to cold air moving through a stone building. Ambergris reads salty and skin-adjacent rather than obviously perfumed. Clove is the material that tips a blend medicinal if it is overdosed, and in these new arrivals it usually sits in small amounts near the top of a long pyramid.

None of these is obscure. Labdanum is carried by 174 fragrances in the library, ambergris by 171, clove by 165, frankincense by 145. What stands out is the concentration: one fortnight of additions leaning on the same short list, and using it as structure rather than trim.

House of Orpheus builds with amber, not around it

House of Orpheus is run by Marcus R. McCoy from Olympia, Washington. He trained as a distiller under Robert Seidel at The Essential Oil Company in Portland, learning tincturing and soxhlet extraction and building his own stills, and the house states that it works with plant, animal and mineral materials rather than standard perfumery ingredients. That shows in how short the note lists are.

Thoth has seven listed notes: ambergris, civet, tonka bean, agars wood, cardamom, amber and saffron. There is no top-heavy citrus opening, no fruit. The cardamom is the only bright thing in it, and it is sitting next to civet. Arktos is the softer sibling, with agar, ambergris, vanilla, tonka bean, oud and classical amber, which is a gourmand reading of the same materials rather than a different palette.

The counterweight is La Sirena, which is hyacinth, sambac jasmine, citron, rose, civet and white musk over an oud and sandalwood base: a white floral with an animalic underside, and no resin note listed at all. So the house is not one-directional. But two of its three most amber-forward additions carry ambergris in the first two positions, which is unusual; most houses reach for it as a base drydown.

The two oil houses use resin as an accent

Ghoulish Goods is a horror and carnival-themed oil shop in the United States, with 73 fragrances in the library at $8 to $35. Its note lists are the opposite of Orpheus: sprawling, often twenty materials deep. Clove turns up in Druid, alongside amaretto, sage, grapefruit and eucalyptus in the top, with oud, oakmoss and patchouli underneath. It turns up again in Lust, where it is paired with pink pepper and saffron over jasmine, almond and incense. And in Yuletide it sits with allspice, juniper and cognac. Same spice, three unrelated briefs.

Labdanum appears at the base of Sweet Temptation, with myrrh and resinous amber, under vanilla crystals, sugar, tonka bean and molasses. That is the clearest case in the batch of resin used to stop a gourmand collapsing into candy. It is currently out of stock.

Seance Perfumes in Los Angeles, founded by Lacey Walker, does something similar with a shorter list. The Phantom is rose, old theater, velvet seats, sandalwood, bourbon and labdanum: the labdanum is doing the dusty, resinous work that the abstract notes only suggest. Opium Den puts frankincense and myrrh against coffee, cream and vanilla. And The Monster drops a single clove into petrichor, thunder, ozone, sandalwood and cedar, which is not a warm composition by any reading.

Season, or just the kind of house arriving?

The seasonal explanation is tempting four days before the equinox, and it is probably wrong. Two of the three houses here are gothic and horror oil houses, where resin, incense and clove are the year-round house language rather than an autumn capsule: a graveyard brief and a Christmas brief both get clove, because that is what the shelf sounds like. Graveyard is the test case, a green, aquatic and earthy oil built on cold air, ozone, cucumber and sea moss, with cinnamon rather than clove in the heart.

The other half of the answer is that resin-heavy naturals are simply where small-batch perfumery concentrates. The MYSTIC from Teone Reinthal Natural Perfume in Brisbane lists hand-tinctured dalzieli frankincense, royal hojary frankincense and labdanum among nearly forty materials. A house working with tinctures and absolutes rather than aroma chemicals ends up with these notes because they are the ones that survive the method. The tilt says more about who joined than about the month.

Where to start

• Thoth, $10 to $240, for anyone who wants ambergris and cardamom without a fruit opening in front of them. The $10 entry makes it the cheapest way into House of Orpheus.
• Druid, 5ml $19 or 10ml $28, for clove as a green herbal accent rather than a Christmas signal. An oil, so it layers.
• Opium Den, $32 for the frankincense and orange blossom size or $125 for the eau de parfum, for readers who want incense and coffee in the same blend.