Today, we’ll look at six fragrances from AbdesSalaam Attar of La Via del Profumo in styles ranging from ambered oud to a green fougère, incensey-woody florals, a boozy, chocolate leather oriental, and a salty, vetiver-laden, woody, spicy oriental. They are: Amber Oud, Lake Blossom, African Night, Sensemilla, Cuoio dei Dolci, and Sea Wood. I’ll look at each one in turn, trying to keep things as short and succinct as I can.
AbdesSalaam’s logo, based on his own calligraphy. Photo: my own.
Sultanate of Oman. Photo & source: omanmagazine.com
Roja Dove released several new fragrances worldwide in October, some of which had previously been exclusive to the British market. Two of those fragrances are Sultanate of Oman and 51. The first is his tribute to Oman, its Sultan, and the country’s famous silver frankincense, considered to be the best in the world. The second was made to celebrate Roja Dove’s new boutique at 51 Burlington Arcade in London and comes in masculine and feminine versions. Today, I’ll look at Sultanate of Oman and the Femme extrait version of 51.
Trying to date vintage Shalimar and navigating eBay to find a bottle of the version that you prefer might seem, at first glance, to be an exhausting, frustrating, and complicated ordeal. However, there are some basic guidelines to make things much simpler. It’s one of those things where the learning curve is initially steep but then, suddenly, it becomes much easier and one can (almost) whip through the many eBay listings to single out the bottles which fit your precise parameters.
So, today, we’ll spend quite a bit of time on the bottle designs for vintage Shalimar, their history, their appearance, their packaging, their differences, and the methods used to try to date the bottles. The analysis will focus almost entirely on the parfum, but I’ll briefly mention the bottle designs for the other concentrations that were discussed in Part II. They’re not hard to date or figure out for the most part but it’s a different story for the parfum, particularly since most eBay sellers don’t know much about the bottles that they’re selling. I recently had to use a sort of reverse engineering or backwards analysis based on nothing more than the height dimensions (inches) of a listed bottle in order to figure out its size and possible date of release. And I’m still not sure of the latter! The process is much like playing Sherlock Holmes except, in this case, the tiny clues often don’t yield definitive answers.
Photo: my own.
Vintage Shalimar is a glorious, head-turning, spellbinding masterpiece of complexity and opulence in its pure parfum form, but the other concentrations can be appealing in different ways or suit different needs. Today, in Part II, we’ll look at the vintage Shalimar Eau de Toilette, Parfum de Toilette, and Eau de Parfum from three decades — the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s — and the ways in which their scent differs in several side-by-side comparisons. Unfortunately, I’m afraid I’m going to have save the technical analysis on how to date bottles of Shalimar for a previously unplanned and additional section, Part III.
Vintage Shalimar in different concentrations and from different years. Photo & bottles: my own.