Perfume

Size:30ml
concentration:Extrait

Ingredients:
Cultivated black kinam, cultivated green kinam, wild Sumatran oud, wild sinensis oud, blue lotus, white lotus, pink lotus, aged tobacco (five varieties), ambergris, damask rose, civet absolute, Chinese jasmine, saffron, cinnamon, bergamot, grapefruit.

Ijtimāʿ begins with two materials held in opposition. Three lotuses: blue, white, pink, each carrying a different water. Five tobaccos from different soils and different decades. Lotus rises. Tobacco grounds. Water and smoke. Cold and warm. These are materials from entirely different worlds; different climates, different geographies, different places in ritual and memory. Even within the same tradition they are never asked to sit beside each other. The perfume does not try to dissolve the difference. It holds it.
Around this centre, the rest of the composition forms the architecture of balance. Cultivated black and green kinam. Oud from Sumatra and from the wild sinensis species. Ambergris. Silk. Saffron. Civet. Rose. Each material a pillar, positioned to hold the weight of the opposing forces at the heart of the composition. Mizaan: the scale, the balance, the principle by which contrast itself is found.
What Ijtimāʿ does is what contrast does. Opposing forces held in proximity, structured by careful architecture, released together as something neither could have been alone. The ingredients enter the bottle as themselves. On the skin they disperse as remnants of what they were: influenced, changed, marked by their meeting with everything else in the vessel. They do not return to what they were before.