Al-Shaya / الشايع
A unique visual signature based on accords, character, and seasonality
The bergamot and grapefruit assault the olfactory senses with crisp, almost aggressive brightness, immediately shadowed by clary sage's herbal green and that strange, mineral plonktar note creating an atmosphere of crystalline unease. This is a fragrance announcing itself as unconventional from the first breath.
As the citrus settles, the jasmine and peony emerge with an unsettling warmth—almost fleshy—whilst that aquatic-briny fish note surfaces unexpectedly, creating a tension between floral sweetness and something oddly metallic and bodily. The composition becomes genuinely strange here, neither perfume nor eau de cologne, but something deliberately unstable.
The base settles into a powdery, almost granular warmth as almond and vanilla soften the edges, with clove and patchouli introducing a faintly smoky, slightly medicinal quality. Rose and musk bind everything into something skin-close and intimate, the fragrance exhaling rather than projecting, becoming more olfactory whisper than declaration.
A'Jbah arrives as a paradox—simultaneously translucent and dense, as though someone had distilled the morning light filtering through an old apothecary's shelves. The opening blast of Italian bergamot and grapefruit establishes a tart, almost bracing clarity, but this is immediately complicated by clary sage's herbal-green persistence and the peculiar presence of "plonktar" (possibly a regional or archival transliteration), which lends an unexpected aquatic-mineral quality that prevents the fragrance from ever feeling purely citrine. What makes A'Jbah arrestingly strange is the jasmine and peony heart threading through this bright opening—rather than sweetening it, these florals introduce an almost bodily warmth, a flush of skin-like intimacy that sits uncomfortably against the fruit-and-herb prelude.
Then comes the real shock: the "fish" note. Rather than creating an overtly aquatic effect, it functions as a saline, almost briny anchor, grounding the florals and preventing them from ascending into typical white floral territory. This is Amélie Bourgeois working against expectation. The base emerges as a powdery-sweet reconciliation of these tensions—almond and vanilla soften the metallic edges, whilst clove and Indonesian patchouli add a faintly smoky, almost medicinal warmth. Rose and musk coalesce into something skin-like rather than perfumery.
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4.0/5 (116)