The House of Oud
A unique visual signature based on accords, character, and seasonality
The blueberry hits with surprising brightness, almost jammy in its immediacy, flanked by soft florals that feel more watercolour than botanical. It's disarming in its sweetness, offering no hint of the oud lurking beneath—you're met with fruit-forward friendliness, something almost whimsical.
The composition pivots noticeably as grape and grape leaf emerge, introducing a green, slightly herbal tension that complicates the initial sweetness. Coffee bean surfaces with quiet insistence, adding earthiness and a subtle bitter edge that prevents the heart from becoming merely sugary. Rose appears not as romantic flourish but as a structural element, grounding the fruit notes with floral weight.
The oud finally reveals itself without fanfare, a woody undertone that builds gradually rather than announcing itself dramatically. Vanilla and amber soften the wood's potential harshness whilst white musk maintains a subtle skin-scent quality—this is where Grape Pearls becomes intimate and personal, the fruited opening now a distant memory.
Grape Pearls announces itself as a peculiar beast: a fragrance that treats dark fruit and oud not as opposing forces but as unlikely collaborators. Andrea Thero Casotti has crafted something that sits uneasily between gourmand frivolity and woody restraint, refusing to commit fully to either camp.
The blueberry and floral opening softens what could have been a brutally austere composition. What emerges is a fragrance built around the central tension of grape and grape leaf—that green, slightly tart quality of the leaf playing against the jammy sweetness of the fruit itself. This isn't the delicate florality of a traditional rose fragrance; here, rose serves as an accomplice to the fruit rather than a lead actor, its role complicated by coffee bean's earthy, slightly bitter intervention.
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3.9/5 (100)