Without So Much as a Handoff (ROUND 2)
SCENT OF THE DAY: Oud Rex Chinese Exclusive, by Ensar
Oudy but with an edge of a salon-spa in poor neighborhood that makes this feel a bit more brighter than the grape tobacco dipped in rum cola of the first version, a version that reads closer to Lonestar Memories (a sibling of both versions). / Has a solid resemblance to Purple Orris Star Ghaliyah by Pinoy Sirun: deep purple over a rich tobacco-castoerum-oud trifecta that would make Ramsey go gaga—and this, for those who know Ramsay’s tastes, means that we are, like Ensar says in his write up, getting something quite sophisticated (befitting a European aristocrat) while not getting the overt animalics or exotic spices that make Prin so repugnant. Ensar lists no Iris here but it has to be contributing to the purple element—blue lotus alone does not suffice. Its impression is more rooty here (perhaps because of how the bitter-tannic black tea synergizes with the fungal myrrh)—no overly cosmetic associations like in the Pinoy. While there is a phenolic element because of the dirty luxury of castoreum and the smoke of various oud varietals, I find that the phenolic element of the Pinoy is more pronounced whereas a cheesy oud (there in nose dives) is more pronounced in the Ensar. /
New oud rex I find cheesier than the old. It’s cheesy Oud through the thick veil of purple and castoreum I get in the older version. The castoreum in this new one is definitely loud too: it’s a castoreum scent, primarily another castoreum leather that you can smell from the beginning. This is something that Ramsay would really like. It has more of the European style with a little bit of cheese in the back. I personally would probably prefer the more Middle Eastern style, but this has a European style with the castoreum leather base.
You have to spend years appreciating perfumes to appreciate this (even though it is quite western). This means you cannot run through perfumes with ADHD. Cultivating taste takes work and discipline. You have to give many chances and you have to have proper olfactory hygiene. Alas some people don’t want that because they are addicted not to perfumes but rather to buying and selling them. The catch and release process kills the pain of mortality. that’s fine. but what is sad is when these types actually think they like perfume. That they don’t is clear in how they run through them. It’s like the old question: “Do you actually love women, or just the chase?” Patience is required. You can’t just leap to Rex. you can’t just speed run to it. Some people just want the same old soaked assam oud. The assam smell is all they think oud is. This fragrance like a lot of Ensar fragrances show the many sides of oud. It will quickly expose fake oud lovers. They will yawn and say “that’s it?”—unable to appreciate what is in their hands.
Really think about it: Chinese oud at the center, surrounded by an entire geography of oud types (Borneo, Cambodian, Indonesian, Sri Lankan, Vietnamese, Burmese, Malayan). To say nothing of the musks and teas and florals and resins, it is as if different forests and traditions were layered to create a single monarchic portrait of the oud material—one united woodiness with diifferent areas more cheesya dn other varnish lieka nd oither areas green, the effect like mermaid’s tail united in its many glinting and fantastical shades of green. This is top shelf stuff.
The opening carries a brightness: Yuzu, grapefruit, pear—illimination of the darker woods beneath. Then you got the bitterness of tea notes—black tea, jasmine tea, and maté—that establishes a dry intellectual edge, a contemplative quality. Civet and both Tonkin and Tibetan musks are present with typical Ensar elegance as opposed to growl. Rather than turning the composition feral, they add atmosphere: a faint warmth that feels bodily but not aggressive. It is the difference between the smell of an animal and the memory of its presence in a wooded place. Tobacco—grape-like, but not as starkly so as the first version—reinforces this effect, lending a dry leathery sweetness that softens the sharper woody edges. Osmanthus is there too to introduce a subtle apricot-leather nuance that merges elegantly with the tobacco and civet. The other florals help with the citrus elements to give this feel of filtered sunlight passing through the canopy of woods—a pond, because of the blue lotus, definitely in the scene but less dreamy than in the first version.
Without So Much as a Handoff
The bus driver's leer, sliding to trunks not so blown out with junk, said he would snub
the calls you knew you would make anyway— keep making (maybe this was another test)
even after he asked the next boy, a thief too soft to touch a worm, “So we goin fishin?”
“We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”—Kafka (against the safe-space cancel culture pushed by anti-art bullies, left and right)
