The House of Oud
A unique visual signature based on accords, character, and seasonality
Davana's roasted amber character immediately subdues the cheerful promise of raspberry and pear blossom, creating an unsettling juxtaposition—sweetness interrupted mid-bloom by something burnt and charred at the edges. The initial effect is bright yet somehow foreboding, as though someone's switched the laboratory lights on in a fruit market.
Tobacco leaf arrives as the true revelation, its dry, leathery character wrestling the raspberry water away from any candied territory and anchoring everything in something more austere and cerebral. Benzoin emerges beneath, adding creamy sweetness, but the silver fir's cool, slightly resinous breath keeps the composition from becoming indulgent or warm.
Charred wood and New Guinean oud form a sparse, almost skeletal foundation where musk acts as a second skin-scent layer rather than a perfume's closing statement. The fragrance retreats inward, becoming deeply personal and intimate—a trace of tobacco smoke and burnt caramel lingering in the fabric of clothing rather than projecting outward.
Empathy arrives as a peculiar contradiction: a fragrance that whispers of intimacy whilst simultaneously maintaining an austere distance. Andrea Thero Casotti has constructed something defiantly unconventional—a fruit-forward composition that refuses sentimentality, anchored instead by charred wood and tobacco smoke that give the sweeter elements a distinctly uncomfortable edge.
The opening salvo of davana and raspberry blossom suggests something almost innocent, yet there's an immediate tension. The davana, with its burnt-sugar stoniness, immediately complicates the pear blossom's delicate florality. This isn't a harmonious fruit basket; it's fruit interrogated under fluorescent light, its beauty compromised by something acrid lurking beneath.
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