The Ascent of Man

Elderly man reading book and smoking pipe in study with books and lamp

There is something old about Al Qiam Gold. Something that has been here before you arrived and will remain long after you leave. This is not merely a fragrance. It is an olfactory portrait of institutional authority, earned wisdom and patrician masculinity — a scent that carries the accumulated weight of a lifetime of deliberate living.

Wild Things, Warm Endings

The opening seems to have no direction, doesn’t know where to go or what it wants to be.  It pushes and pulls in multiple directions at once: an icy vanilla chai, strong and unmistakable, herby and even medicinal around the edges.  Then a whiff of hay and grass, that somehow provides a little sun, stripping the chill from the air.  It’s grassy and grounded without quite becoming vetiver.  This is the difference between genuine, authentic lavender, and synthetics used in more inexpensive compositions.  This feels like walking through a field full of wild lavender, rather than a handful of crushed  and concentrated petals: airy, warm, open, as big as the Montana sky.    And yet, it is this push and pull with which Myrrh and Tonka seduces: first it’s one thing, then another, and now this—pure enigma.