Journal Notes:

Here's a confession: I always thought of myself as a not-a-rose guy.

Early in my journey into artisanal perfumery, the Turkish Delight profile turned me off almost every time. As luck would have it, that was most of what I sampled back then.

Later, I explored the wider range of rose profiles and started to appreciate the nuance in each species, cultivar, region, and even batch. I began working rose into my blends, and gradually it claimed a main spot. Qinan Rose came out of that stretch, and it's the one people kept asking me to repeat.

Here's the thing: I don't remake blends. I don't keep formulas, on purpose. So this isn't a reissue, and it isn't meant to be one. What I wanted was to return to the same materials and see what my nose would do with them now, a few blends later. The materials are the thread. Everything else is intuition.

So I explored that direction again. Same rose, same supplier, with another layer of premium ouds and roses on top. The result, Hainan Rose, is a rose oud that holds from the first moment to the drydown.

I made a large batch of the base and I'm offering part of it, for now, as an attar. A spray version may follow, but much later. Why? In my experience, perfumer's alcohol can amplify a note or silence it completely. When alcohol is the carrier, I let a blend age until it settles into balance. That's a discussion for another day.

The ouds

The ouds in the base came from collectors and oud suppliers. There's Assafi, to my nose one of the most leathery ouds out there. Don't let that scare you: it's used in a small amount, there to give the other ouds a shoulder to lean on.

Then there's a creamy aged Malay from 2012 and a Manipuri from the same period. Not funky, not cheesy, just honeyed oudy goodness. There's an aged Merauke from 2010 and a vintage Burmese from 2005, the same two I offered as add-ons. And a premium two-day-soak Thai like no other: floral, woody, and slightly sweet.

The roses

On the rose side, there are two vintage SQ roses, Hindi and Bulgarian, plus the White rose used in Qinan Rose. Borrowing a lesson from that blend and others, I also added a dose of a vintage SQ Papua oud-rose (listed here as Two Souls). Why?

Vintage materials do wonders for a blend. Sometimes, no matter how well crafted a formula is, you approach the point asymptotically: closer and closer, but never quite there. You're stuck at 95%, and what you need is a shift to reach that last 5%. That's where vintage materials come in.

The Hainan

Then there's the hallmark, the material the blend is named for: Hainan.

Finding good Chinese oud is its own pursuit. Plenty of it is clean, correct, and unobjectionable, and honestly, forgettable. What takes effort to find is character: the kind that stops you mid-swipe, makes you pause, and keeps you inhaling. That's what I was after, and most of what I sampled wasn't it.

In the end, I chose three. One is a decade old (circa 2016), from a collector who was encouraged to take it by the Chinese collector who originally owned it. The other two came from artisans and collectors renowned in their own right. One dates to 2019. The other may be younger, but it's wild, traditionally distilled, and has a full-blown, satisfying Hainan profile.

A Spray?

Yep. In the works.