Photo, creative direction, and digital editing by a_nose_knows for Fragrance du Bois Sahraa
If you read this in English, as it’s written, words will come at you as a blank canvas, or like beautiful empty cups, already selected by me but ready to be filled, by you, with concepts. It’s a sort of partnership, this, between you and me; I would venture to say that while the thinking happens behind my brows, the true creativity happens behind yours—because I couldn’t write good texts if you weren’t there to put, into my words, the legendary beauty pouring from the eye of the beholder.
Photo, creative direction, and digital editing by a_nose_knows for Fragrance du Bois Sahraa
Other languages, in turn, are made of glasses partially-filled. Heavy as they are with ideas, lifting them is harder and needs be done carefully, lest we spill the meaning and the whole composition becomes, well, messy. It happens often with idioms where there are more rules on topic (order of words in a sentence, like the Saxon family), or languages where nouns and all their friends have genders: tavola, for example, in Italian, means table, and it’s a feminine noun. If we were to say THE table, for example, the article is also feminized: LA tavola.
Fuller still are stricter languages, where new sounds, tenses, cases, tones, agglutinations, genders, and intent add layers upon layers of difficulty and depth: Icelandic, !Xóõ, Russian, Min Chinese, Navajo, Taa, Basque, Hungarian, Ubykh, Bora.
Photo, creative direction, and digital editing by a_nose_knows for Fragrance du Bois Sahraa
Cups and chalices, beakers, goblets—following the line of receptacles of meaning as far back as history (and wikipedia) would let us go, we’ll inevitably come to a point where big concepts get so big they completely fill their wordy glasses—that’s where we find primordial truths, immovable values, and universal wisdom. It’s also where we, modern people speaking newer languages, get surprised, for that usually happens when we pass into things bigger than ourselves, less confined, and less binary: cosmogony; spirituality; art.
dana sandu Photo, creative direction, and digital editing by a_nose_knows for Sahraa
Babylonians, Assyrians and Jews share the noble roots of the Aramaeans, a Semitic people of scribes and literate merchants so agile in thought that their language became lingua franca from Egypt to the Achaemenids to further East, into today’s Pakistan. An international communication tool throughout the Fertile Crescent, Imperial Aramaic carries two heavy significances: one is newer and liturgical, of Biblical importance; the other, older and more rooted into the dawn of life, is less known but equally important: for the proto-Aramaeans, the sun was feminine. The moon god, in turn, was pseudo-masculine, and their name was Sahra. Fragrance du Bois Sahraa (François Merle-Baudoin), too, feels primordial, atemporal, and pan-gender: massive and overwhelming, it is quite linear in smell but geometrically-progressive in presence (which, I think, is smart); for as any big notions, the closer it gets, the more absolute the takeover, and the harder to see individual elements clearly. (Nor is there a need, for the calibration is sensible and everything, while carrying individual meaning, speaks in unison: the herbal bits are incisive, but creamy and neutral; the fruits and flowers are ripe, but not adding unnecessary pulse; the woods are lustrous and mature; the spices, meticulous).
The result is grand, warp-y, and, yes, lunar, in a way: slightly cold and moody, glassy, not necessarily wide but shooting in height, it covers everything yet makes you open your eyes wider and wider in the hopes that it’ll help you see more and more… until you’re bathed in it and, humble, to it you resign. (The other result is that it makes people like me wax poetic and see goblet shapes in the symbol for Sahra, the moon god… Yes, a coincidence. But I too am, after all, a beauty beholder.)
Official notes: grapefruit, rose absolute, geranium, jasmine, patchouli, black pepper, sandalwood, saffron, vanilla, amber, 100% pure organic vintage oudh
Other perceived notes: (dark) berries, salt, pine, cedar, long pepper, metallic note, medicinal lavender, bay leaf, almondy powder, marmalade, vetiver
Disclaimer: Sahraa provided for review by Fragrance du Bois. Thank you much, it’s already been sprayed more often than many others.
– dana sandu, Editor
Photo, creative direction, and digital editing by a_nose_knows for Sahraa
Thanks to the generosity of Fragrance du Bois, we have a 50 ml bottle of Sahraa available anywhere in the world WITH THE FOLLOWING EXCEPTIONS, CANNOT BE SENT TO RUSSIA, KAZAKHASTAN, UKRAINE, MEXICO, BRAZIL, SOUTH AMERICA OR AFRICA for one registered reader (you must register on our site or your comment will not count). To be eligible, please tell us what you enjoyed or found interesting about dana’s review, if you’ve tried any Fragrance du Bois perfume before, and where you live. Draw closes 11/25/20
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