Tailored
The idea for a community-driven blend was inspired by collaborative software development, where developers contribute to a shared codebase to build a product together. I wanted to bring that model to perfumery. Some time ago, I floated the concept on Facebook to plant the seed, but it didn’t get the traction I was hoping for. In hindsight, the issue went deeper than a lack of structure. The problem was with the workflow, and the model itself wasn’t fully conceived. Too many people were contributing competing ideas, with no clear way to converge on a cohesive blend. More importantly, I hadn’t made the distinction clear between contributing to the original project (or to a completely new one) and branching off from an existing blend to develop it in its own direction. I stepped away from the idea for a while. Later, it hit me: branch off from an existing blend, develop something new, and let it stand in its own right. Think of how a Linux distribution builds on an upstream foundation while developing its own identity, priorities, and community. Every distro has a steward: a body or entity that plays the role of maintainer, defines its vision, and steers its direction toward a clear goal. For me, that maintainer is typically an influencer, a single voice who steers the direction, and the Tailored release is their own distro, in both senses: built on an upstream, and distributed by them. Unscripted is the upstream. It has its own DNA, and anything built downstream has to align with the conventions and framework that define it. In a way, Tailored is a semi-bespoke distro, at scale. Guidelines Every Tailored release follows the same ground rules: It starts from an Unscripted blend. The upstream might be released or still in development, and the Tailored version builds on its underlying DNA. It is a new composition. Unscripted blends aren’t documented for exact remakes. A Tailored version is never a plain copy. I shift the emphasis while retaining the original’s character. One maintainer leads. Each release is guided by a single voice, typically an influencer, who has earned their community’s trust. The maintainer owns distribution. They take responsibility for offering the blend to their community and distributing it within it. That is the second meaning of “distro.” It is exclusive. A Tailored release is available only through the maintainer who commissioned it. As such, it will not be sold through Elkhaldi Studio. It is one batch. Once it sells out, it will not be remade. It needs to be viable. Each Tailored blend needs a minimum batch size and a target price point that work for both the community and the production run. Because a batch is made once, it works best when the community is already in place. The feasible batch size will also depend on how much of the selected base I have available. How to get Tailored Tailored is for someone who leads or curates a community of fragrance lovers and has earned that community’s trust, typically an influencer. The maintainer brings the vision and the community. I bring the perfumery. Get in touch. Tell me about your community: who they are, what they love, how you reach them, and why they trust you. Choose a base. Pick an Unscripted blend, released or in development, that you connect with. Share your direction. Tell me what you want to bring out of it: fresher, darker, woodier, and so on. Agree the terms. We settle the batch size and target price point so the release works for your community. Develop and review. I rework the blend, you test it, and we refine it until it fits your vision, within an agreed number of iterations. Release. The finished blend is produced as a single batch and distributed exclusively through you. If you lead a community and want to commission a Tailored release, get in touch.
Add Ons
Let me start with what add-ons are not. They are not there because a blend is incomplete. Far from it. I only release blends that feel ready. In fact, it hurts, both emotionally and for the cost and materials lost, to remember the blends I scrapped because the quality or goal wasn't hit. I always recommend trying the original blend first, before going the add-on route. So why offer them? Some blends come across so robust that they can be taken in a few further directions. Those directions have implications on cost, and I wanted to give you the option rather than enforce it on you and raise the price. If you're looking for something semi-bespoke, add-ons are how you get there. They are also not random. Each add-on is offered based on a careful selection of materials, chosen because I believe they work with the blend at hand. My approach has also evolved. With Bateekh, I changed my strategy and offered four ready-made options based on a hunch about what customers would go with. This lets me acquire materials in larger amounts, which brings the cost down for everyone. So going forward, you can expect some preset choices, and others available as add-ons if you choose to go that way. It is also a productization question. Too many options can be confusing, and none can be constraining. With artisanal blends, I'm trying to do two things at once: create a memorable formulation, and build a platform that allows for extensions. (Sorry, systems engineer speak.) So it is always a question of balancing options at an additional cost per gram against predicted, ready-made ones. I'd rather keep that balance honest and let you decide where you want to land.
Prices and Materials
Do all materials need to be expensive? It's a loaded question, and the honest answer is: it depends. Material cost is driven by many things: rarity, how hard it is to source (sometimes that means negotiating with and convincing an owner to let it go), production volume, age, scent profile, shipping, and rising costs across much of the supply chain. Whether a material is worth using in a blend is a different question, and I think it's best answered from the consumer's side. As a perfumer making work for people, I ask myself: will someone actually appreciate this material, whether for its rarity, its cost, or its scent? Not every material will interest every customer, and rightly so. I'll admit that, as a perfumer who aspires to work with rare materials, getting my hands on something hard to find thrills me, as I imagine it does every perfumer. But the litmus test is this: does the material add something to the blend beyond romance and nostalgia? In my experience, some materials do, and some blends genuinely benefit from them. Qinan Rose and Soul of My Soul would not be what they are without high-grade Hainan oud (Qinan Rose) and Two Souls, a vintage Papua rose (in both sprays). With Chinese ouds in particular, many lean generic to my nose. It takes a great deal of sampling and testing to find one that is truly unique and worth offering. You might try 20 oils to find one you love. Other ouds have better odds, more hits than misses, but not Chinese. Patchouli is similar. I've smelled nondescript patchouli oils, and others that could honestly be considered perfumes in their own right. I may offer one as a soliflore in the future. The effect of a great material isn't always a sharp spike in one note. Often it's an overall upgrade to every aspect of the blend. Take Musk Melange, the blend so many of you loved. At the time I offered it at half my own cost, because I wanted people to try my work. Had I priced it at its actual cost plus a margin, I'm not sure it would have been noticed the way it was. That blend contains many musk tinctures that are around a decade old. You can rarely achieve something like it without those materials. You might come close, and the effect of age can be simulated or reverse-engineered (as in the upcoming Misk Ateeq), but it can't truly be replicated. Beyond the age of the material itself, there's the curation and preparation: tincturing, filtering, treating, and rebalancing to accentuate one note over others. That takes time and effort, and often means losing material along the way. In any other industry, we'd call that R&D. Oud Session and Ambergris Spectrum, among others, took a great deal of work to prepare. I often work on a blend for many months, sometimes closer to a year, before it reaches the online store. It isn't only the materials or the process; it's also the time the materials need to age. So the answer is: some blends can be made with lower-cost materials, and others simply can't. A great deal goes into making a blend, and then comes the final step: pricing it. My approach is to consult a small circle of select customers, perfumers, and vendors before anything reaches the store. They know the market, and they buy and collect themselves. Think of them as my own board of directors. After all, I could put gold leaf in a bottle, but it wouldn't add anything noticeable to the scent beyond an attractive look (unless it triggered some unexpected chemical interaction, which isn't something I care to explore in my work right now). In the end, the question comes down to the consumer: would that be worth a higher price tag? I always aim to price blends in line with their current market value. My rule is that nothing should be overpriced. I look for the sweet spot: high enough to cover costs and fund future blends, but low enough that things actually move. Pricing is the other end of choosing materials, and neither happens in a vacuum. Making perfume is about far more than clicking "buy" on one oil or another based on price.
Lighter?
So far, I've mostly relied on my own judgement, as the maker, to decide how best to present a scent. But many of you have asked for lighter versions: lighter on clothes, lighter in presence, and lighter on the wallet. After all, a blend is made to be worn — by you! I've always tried to give you a choice, so each blend can become your own. That started as X Editions, where "X" was whatever you wanted to add to a blend, and over a few releases it became the more focused set of Add-ons I offer today. Some blends want to stay dense, and some want to stay light. So I'll be revisiting some of my current blends to make lighter versions of them that, to my nose, are still concentrated enough to give each blend what it deserves. To drive the point home on concentration, let me clarify a few things. You experience a perfume when its scent molecules physically reach the receptors in your nose, either because you sniff your skin up close or because the molecules have drifted into the air around you. That drifting is what we call projection. But reaching your nose isn't enough. You only notice the molecules your receptors can detect. Think of it like Lego: a molecule has to click into a receptor that fits it. Each receptor fits a range of shapes, and each molecule fits several receptors, so every scent is a pattern of pieces clicking into place. Not everyone has the same pieces. Some people can't smell certain molecules at all, and certain musks are a well-known example. That's one reason the same blend can smell different to you than to someone else. What the scent sits in matters too. In a spray, the scent is dissolved in alcohol. Alcohol evaporates within minutes, so a spray opens fast and fills the air right away. Once the alcohol is gone, the scent molecules keep leaving your skin on their own, each at its own pace: the lightest first, the heaviest last. In an attar, the scent sits in oil. Oil barely evaporates, so it holds the molecules back and lets them go slowly. That's why attars sit closer to the skin, project less, and can last a long time. Warmth speeds up both. A blend behaves differently on a hot day, and on your wrist compared with your shirt. Which brings me to a trade-off. A molecule is either on your skin or clothing, or in the air. There's no Schrödinger's cat business in perfumery; it can't be in both places at once. For the same amount of perfume, the faster it leaves, the more you smell it now and the less is left for later. Slower release means softer projection that lasts longer. It's a trade-off, not a strict rule. Wearing more, or wearing a stronger blend, can give you more of both. Then there's concentration itself. Think of scent molecules as people in a room. A crowded room is loud, noticeable, and slow to empty. A room with fewer people is quieter, airier, and empties sooner. But the people aren't all alike. Some leave almost as soon as they arrive; others stay until the end. With natural materials, who is in the room matters more than how many. The same material can behave differently depending on how it was processed or how long it has aged. That's why a number on a label tells you so little, and why I judge a lighter version by nose, not by percentage. A lighter version is softer, less dense, and fades sooner. It also has an upside: some materials show different sides of themselves when they have more room. A lighter version isn't just a weaker copy. It can reveal facets that the denser one hides. Where you wear a scent matters too. Your skin has its own chemistry: its natural oils, moisture, warmth and pH all interact with the blend. Drier skin often lets a scent fade faster, while oilier or well-moisturised skin tends to hold it longer. Even the condition of your skin on a given day plays a part. That's why the same blend can wear differently on you than on someone else, and even on you from one day to the next. If you want a more even, predictable experience, try your clothes. Fabric has no chemistry of its own to change the scent and no body heat pushing it off, so a blend tends to smell closer to how I made it, and it often lasts longer too. That's another reason I'm making lighter versions of the current drop. Many of you wanted to spray them on light-colored shirts, and the denser versions, rich in dark natural materials, can mark pale fabric. The lighter versions are much gentler on clothes, but natural materials can still leave a trace, so test on a hidden spot first. When someone asks me what the concentration is, my answer is usually "enough." Now there's simply a "lighter enough."
My Taxonomy
This is how I organize my work in perfumery as I strive to remain clear about intention, structure, and what each composition is meant to be. My work, so far, moves through three strategies which I refer to as Compositions: Solos, Bases, and Genres, shaped across three ways of making, which I call Signature: Unscripted, Curated, and Co-authored. Signature Unscripted is discovery-led. I work directly with materials without a fixed formula. The composition develops in real time through interaction with the raw materials themselves. Curated is integrity-led. I seek and select only high-quality work from trusted artisans and collectors I have built relationships with over time. Everything is offered exactly as I receive it—unaltered, uncompromised, and in its original form. Co-authored is collaborative. I set the initial direction, then hand it to another perfumer to reinterpret or develop further. Think of it like a kitchen: I make the dough, they take it and shape it into what they see fit. Composition (Architecture) Solos standalone work. No shared base, no continuation, no structural link to other perfumes. Each piece exists fully on its own. Bases came from my curiosity to work from a shared foundation as a point of departure. Instead of starting from scratch every time, I use a common base as a branching structure—allowing me to explore different directions from a single olfactive starting point. It creates a controlled divergence space: one root, many paths. Genres sit between repetition and reinvention. It came from a different need entirely—the request for continuity. People often want a perfume to return, to be “the same again,” but I generally aim not to repeat myself in a literal way. Genres allow me to revisit an idea without freezing it. The core narrative remains recognizable. It is a way to stay in dialogue with an idea without locking it into stasis. Extensibility Orthogonal to Signature and Composition is the idea of Extensibility. This concept evolved from an earlier approach I called X Editions, where “X” represented whatever a customer wanted to add to a blend. Over time, that open-ended flexibility became too loose, and I moved toward a more refined and constrained set of controlled additions. Having worked on a few releases, I realized that certain blends—specific implementations of compositions—can naturally accommodate additional notes, either to amplify an existing profile or to introduce a complementary direction. The goal is not to transform the perfume into something else, but to extend its language without breaking its identity. This idea comes from my research in human-computer interaction and modular systems thinking, where systems are designed as templates for interaction rather than fixed objects. In the same way, these perfumes function as structured frameworks—allowing variation and personal direction while preserving core identity. Intuition This framework reflects how I currently understand my work and how it evolves. Often intuition leads first, and only later reveals its structure—almost as if it is saying: "this is what I meant all along." I am simply putting that into words.
Wait Before You Wear It
Shared wisdom says you should let your perfume rest for a few days after it arrives. Here’s why: Shipping can shake your bottle and expose it to temperature changes, introducing microscopic air bubbles that temporarily disturb the blend. These bubbles can affect how volatile top notes evaporate, making the perfume smell sharper, flatter, or less integrated. Letting the bottle rest allows the bubbles to dissipate and the scent to regain its intended balance. The same applies to bespoke or freshly blended perfumes. When freshly made, the ingredients haven’t fully interacted. Over weeks, processes like co-solvation, mild oxidation, and slow esterification help the blend stabilize, soften edges, and harmonize the overall composition. Think of this as maturation—the slow development where sharp notes settle, transitions smooth out, and trace oxidation adds subtle warmth and depth. The older it is, the more rounded and luxurious it smells. Patience truly pays off—giving your perfume time to rest lets you experience it as it was meant to be: balanced, integrated, and complete.
The Concentration Question
I’m moving away from traditional labels like EDP, Parfum, or Extrait. I don’t see much value in holding onto these terms, because they imply a standardization that simply doesn’t fit what I do or how I work. These labels suggest that perfumes within a certain category will perform similarly—but in my experience, that’s not entirely true. The character of a blend comes from the types and quality of the materials I use. You might see some consistency in mostly synthetic blends, but when I work largely—or solely—with natural materials, these labels can be misleading. The variations in the materials themselves are far more significant than any standardized concentration number. Some materials differ in processing, some in age—factors that profoundly affect the final composition. For example, a 10% musk tincture that’s one year old might need to be used differently than a 10% musk tincture that’s five years old. Each variation is unique, and trying to impose rigid numeric measures feels like chasing a mirage. If my work were reduced to numbers, I’d quickly lose interest in perfumery altogether. I approach perfumery as an attempt to capture olfactory moments in liquid form—much like painting captures a moment on canvas in color and form. Whether real or imagined, asking a painter how much white pigment they used—or how many tubes they emptied to produce their work—is absurd. They simply use enough to achieve the effect they intend. That said, when a blend feels like it could benefit from a different concentration—and indeed offer behavior worth experiencing on its own at that level—I will introduce it. In those cases, I create my own labels. Not to be a rebel, but to emphasize that the standard EDP/Parfum/Extrait distinctions are not necessarily relevant or meaningful for my work. The only questions I can meaningfully answer are practical ones: for instance, “What impact does adding one gram of X oil have on this existing blend?” That’s concrete, measurable, and relevant to the client. Questions like “What’s the concentration?” or “How much of this is in that blend?” are not questions I am interested in entertaining—especially if the intent is to compare my work to another perfume. I don’t do perfumery to compete with others—I do it to challenge myself. Looking back to measure progress against a standard only holds me back. For me, growth is forward-focused; the moment you look back, you’re already behind.
Bases To Genres
I’ve always moved between building bases and creating individual blends. Bases—collections of notes and accords—serve as seeds, giving life to multiple blends that share a root but grow in their own directions. Early on, I experimented with X Editions, a way to let customers shape a scent by amplifying or even adding notes not present in the original blend. In theory, it was an exciting experiment in mass customization. In practice, there were just too many “knobs to turn.” The process felt overwhelming rather than empowering, and I realized complexity can sometimes obscure intention. From that came Add-ons. By simplifying choices to a few focused options with clear guidance, I created a gentler entry point for customization. Add-ons are a bridge—a way for customers to gradually participate in shaping a fragrance, building the confidence to explore semi-bespoke or bespoke scents. It was a step toward collaboration, without losing clarity or identity. Alongside this, I began thinking about Genres. A Genre, for me, is a collection of profiles that give a scent its character, while a Base is a collection of notes—the raw materials. If you like software analogies, a base is a library of components, and a genre is a framework that shapes how the system behaves. Notes form accords, accords form profiles, and profiles define a genre. Genres let me honor familiar directions that people enjoy while still leaving room to explore new territory. Today, I’m developing five core genres: Purple-Gris, Musk, Leather, Resin, and Cola. Each draws from past blends that resonated with customers, but none are recreations—they are frameworks for new expressions. Alongside these, I continue to create one-off blends, explorations that exist outside any framework. So, in a way, it's: One-Offs ⊂ Bases ⊂ X Editions ⊂ Add-Ons ⊂ Genres All of this is shaped by my background: trained equally in the arts and computation, I’ve worked across architecture, software, and manufacturing. I love structures, patterns, taxonomies, modularity, and reuse, but I also thrive on freestyle creation. Perfumery, for me, is where these impulses intersect—a space where rigor and intuition coexist, and where every scent can both honor tradition and explore the new.
Creamy Leather
Leather was one of the first materials I ever experimented with. You might have seen a couple of bottles floating around under the name Scarlet Leather. Back then, I was new — curious, learning, and admittedly unsure. The leather I used was entirely synthetic. I wasn’t building a philosophy; I was trying to understand structure, projection, and texture. How something tactile could exist as vapor. It was experimentation in its purest form. Over the many blends I’ve since released, my understanding of materials deepened. Blending became less about layering notes and more about control, balance, and intention. What notes appear when, how they transition, and how they land. Up until recently, I viewed leather as an accord. That changed when I got a sample of CO2-extracted Night-Blooming Jasmine. Sure, it had the Jasmine character — floral, a little weighted — but it wasn’t indolic. It was creamy. Leathery creamy. Suddenly, gears in my brain started turning. I envisioned how this could become a leather-Jasmine project. What began as a single blend turned into the seed for a leather genre: something resinous, creamy, and versatile enough to work not just with Jasmine, but with Rose or other materials as well. I remember joking to a friend that it feels like a luxury leather seat — polished, warm, lived-in. Not rugged. Not aggressive. The kind of leather that doesn’t need to prove itself. And yes, I realize it might be a bit (or a lot) irrational to use Night-Blooming Jasmine as a material to build a core leather accord for other blends. But if you read up on perfumery, you’ll see that many masterpieces use exotic materials to create a robust, characterful foundation. So I’m not totally crazy here. Probably just a little irresponsible.
Purple, Violette, Banafsaj, Lilacy, Etc
The concept for this blend was Purple Ambergris. I envisioned its character through a set of keywords: iris, violet, ambergris, oceanic, powdery — dark, certainly. In the past, I approached my work through bases: Blue Roast, Nectar, Ambergris Spectrum, Ghazali — each guiding a single blend or a set of experiments. This time, I wanted to do something different. Present from the earliest stages was Nigella damascena, known as Love in a Mist. Its curved petals, pale blue and purple, inspired the mood, while its profile — part vanillic beeswax, part rose, part powdery iris — anchored the idea. Its hue sits between blue and purple. Ambergris made its way initially as a fixative. I macerated gray ambergris in Nigella oil… then it went out of control. Black, brown, gray, and white facets emerged, transforming the blend in ways I hadn’t anticipated. Experience has shown me that a full ambergris profile only comes to life when all these facets are present. In nature, ambergris is rarely uniform; it is intermixed, later separated, and commercially categorized by color. Alongside this, over the past ten months, I gathered purple florals: violet enfleurage, lilac, liatris, lavender, heliotrope, and iris — Pallida, Sibirica, and Germanica — each contributing a different shade of powder, root, or floral shadow. I also added blueberry and blackcurrant to balance the profile with fruity notes that kept the earthy, almost dusty aspect that comes from Iris Germanica. I was searching for a particular darkness. Something grounded, weighted, but not heavy. I knew it had to be a combination of wild Nagaland oud and Mission fig: dark purple, almost black, the same material I sourced for the first release of Ghazali. Natural Mission fig is exceptionally difficult to obtain. I know of only a single artisan who produces it, largely for her own work and sparingly for her store; it is time-consuming to make and prohibitively expensive. So far, this has been a joy to work on and experience, as it kept getting better. And in my experiments, the profile proved so versatile and robust that I could turn almost anything into drop-dead beautiful — at least to me. A side note on Iris Did you know that the national flower of Palestine is the Faqqu’a Iris? I wanted to offer an interpretation of it in this blend. I have never smelled Faqqu’a in person, but descriptions place it somewhere between powdery and musky. To approach that idea, I combined Sibirica for its extreme powdery quality with Germanica for its musky, green, root-like depth. This isn’t Faqqu’a itself, but my interpretation of its described profile. Maybe one day I’ll be able to experience it in person, in Jenin.
