Night Song

Night Song featured notes include: Indian oud, Tobacco, Champaca, Pink Lotus, Mysore Sandalwood, Myrrh, Frankincense, Labdanum and Vanilla.

Night Song opens with medicinal pungency & conjures the scent-scape of a natural therapies clinic – liniments, tonics, bitters and compounded herbs. There’s a smoky layer at first encounter, not how most people imagine a pretty sounding thing like a Night Song should smell. This is created by the tobacco and Hindi (Indian oud). Strange top notes, I know. It is primal and raw and animalic in a completely different way to western perfumery. Indian oud, harvested from Aquilaria agallocha trees in Assam, is the whole barnyard. The oud used in Night Song is the real deal, and for most people exposed to synthetic ‘oud’ of mass-produced fragrances, this is a completely different scent altogether. Black in hue and in scent. It is the Night… in Night Song.

As the drydown begins, you find yourself transported into a lush, tropical garden park at dusk. The air is singing with the molasses-thick scents of champaca flowers and pink lotus. Champaca (a magnolia) is a complex and difficult flower to incorporate in perfume. It often smashes its way to the front and bombards all else with its bombastic presence. The earthiness of Pink Lotus – also a powerhouse floral fragrance, engages in a battle that may never be won. There is the crux of it. The sexual tension that exists between the opposing florals is the true substance, the Song of this Night Song. It is the dark, earthy anchor created by the tobacco and oud in tandem with the resins – Myrrh and Frankincense, and the creamy sweet Mysore sandalwood that provide a sturdy scaffold for the florals to wrestle around upon. Vanilla amplifies the sweet, gustatory elements of every floral facet of Night Song, causing a creamy/fruity layer to emerge – a tropically humid, sweat-soaked, erotic tryst in the moonlight. .

Best by far when worn in humid, hot weather, I imagine Night Song as the queenly scent worn by the Empress Draupadi (Sanskrit: योजनगन्धा) – ‘she whose fragrance can be felt for miles’.