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.