Âme Sombre G1
Sultan Pasha (2014)

Âme Sombre Grade I begins with an incredibly lush, lemony rose that has the effect of flooding the gloomy church corridors with light and air. Rose is usually added to oud to give it a sweet juiciness to counteract its sour, stark woodiness, and here it plays that role both for the austere, pine-like frankincense and the sourish cedar. Then a clutch of dark, balmy resins and leather notes moves in to draw a black velvet cloak over the bright, sourish rose, rendering the tone of the attar somber and serious. Grade I is slightly darker, more phenolic, and more sour-rosy in feel than the Oud Infusion, which draws sweet woodsmoke notes from the agarwood infusion. Grade I employs more of a focus on balmy leather notes than the other versions.

Overall, Âme Sombre Grade I feels more Northern in tone than Middle-Eastern. There is a fresh juniper note in the background that further bolsters this ‘Orthodox Church in a chilly Northern forest’ tonality. In terms of overall approach, Âme Sombre Grade I is perhaps the closest to the original Tribute with its stark, smoky cedar-frankincense combination. It is also intensely powerful, lasting on my skin all day and well beyond a shower.

Ame Sombre is my favorite take on the Frankincense theme. Supposedly inspired by the legendary attar from Amouage, Tribute, which I have not tried, and I'm not sure I want to since I can't imagine anything better than this. And since Amouage was always sort of mediocre to me, I'll probably never hunt it down. When I can just get more of this.

Ame Sombre strikes me as a highly spiritual blend in which Rose and Frankincense dominate. On paper, it looks redundant, something that has been done before. But it is unlike anything that I've tried. The balance and the way the ingredients work together, it is supreme. Clouds of frankincense wafting from the thurible, lush, sweet rose petals on top of clean, warm, and slightly mineral ambergris. I can't detect much oud in here, it is not a prominent note. The saffron is a major player as well, especially for the first half of the perfume. It is a light attar compared to others in the line. It wears delicately around yourself. Like fumigating your clothes with bakhoor. Every note is in tune. There's no moment when I sense a lack of harmony in this. The smoke is soft and ethereal, never intrusive, the rose is lush and sweet but never jammy, and the ambergris is crystalline and warm, only embracing the blend in a warm veil.

Elegant, mysterious, and poised. A triumphant attar and one of my favorites from the house.

IG:@memory.of.scents

As all of the Sultans creations - awesome quality , blending and structure...hard to zero in on notes because of how well they blend... this composition in particular paints a picture in my mind...country cottage with all wood including the furniture...the smell of incense and beeswax candles mixing with the smell drifting in from the rose garden outside the window...opens with sledgehammer intensity and within a couple of hours mellows out...well done and highly enjoyable...somewhat gothic and dark , but i love that about it...

After application to my skin I got a intense blast of medicinal Oud and it was full on hospital band-aid with the disinfectant smell which caught me off guard. But before I could regroup and gather my senses I was assaulted by the most intense overwhelming Frankincense accord. lol.. With this knock out Incense blast was some rose and a hint of saffron

At this point I was surrounded in a super potent Frankincense accord that I could have got a job as a Exorcist: " The power of my scent compels you devil, leave this innocent and back to hell with you." lol

The quality was exceptional I could smell the lemony part of the Frankincense and it even overwhelmed the medicinal aspect, the poor rose was drowning in church incense. Then suddenly and dramatically after two hours the scent just died and became a skin scent, I got a few whispers of tobacco but the scent was basically gone.

So all in all I enjoyed the artistic experience with this one and had fun experiencing the Incense but it was just too overwhelming and short lived for my tastes to wear as a personal fragrance.

Ame Sombre is an absolutely amazing fragrance centered around the use of a rich, heady frankincense, a voluptuous, ripe and juicy (but simultaneously hidden and mysterious) rose, a thick, chewy hyrax, a sweeter, less peppery cumin than I'm used to, benzoin-honeyed, raw pipe-tobacco, earthy, creamy saffron tinged patchouli, and a majestically ambered, leathery labdanum.

The composition is heady, thick, chewy, musky as hell, smoky, and yet, juicy, rich, slightly sweet, almost edible at points and reveals the amazing care Sultan Pasha takes when tending to the fragrances of his that have a strong dichotomy at their core - for Ame Sombre is one of those fragrances that doesn't allow muddied or drowned qualities to overtake the nuanced play at work between the total form of the composition - It's absolutely a dense affair, don't get me wrong, but it's the difference between the solid and calcified remains of lava, and the molten flames themselves - neither completely consuming the other, and with a clear referential link guiding one from the lava to the solid form it later becomes.

A lot of the notes here almost turn this dark, spicy, balsamic affair towards something edible at the edges - for it has a lot of qualities which sing to the financially exotic affairs of the rich and the famous. What's more, the ambergris is absolutely present here, and undulates betwixt adding a salty touch to the spiced, and smoky tones carrying a majority of the fragrance, and other times still adding to the warm, sweet and ambered qualities that seem to bellow underneath the waves of dense, dark smoke, musk, spices and woods that run overtop each other, as if waves of syrupy resin cascading atop each other, one after another.

There is in fact a quiet jasmine note that begins to appear as the fragrance itself dries down, which joins with the patchouli to accentuate the leathery qualities which seem to be coming from the labdanum, as well as the tobacco which emerges through the thicker animallic qualities and more prominently atop a bed of resins. While the musk seems to persist here, it's more at the background of the composition than directly at the forefront. Absolutely one of the very best "dark scents" of all time, and one which, to me, is the true elixir that houses like Amouage boast as being contained within their line, but whose works fall short when stood next to Ame Sombre.

Holy shit.
10/10

YT: Jess AndWesH

The opening rose otto with jagged peaks of saffron takes off and soars. The radiance and lightness of rose otto with the sharp edge that saffron imparts is a striking opening. A light undercurrent of frankincense adds thickness to the rose scent, jasmin adds to the lyrical lightness in the heart. All of this dancing song of rose and saffron is underwritten by very dry negative space of woods with labdanum, hyrax, tobacco and vanilla that is very soft and dry as to almost escape notice during the first hours, but later this soft mellow base takes center stage and becomes the scent with the rose saffron still in background as a distant memory. This is a very fine, composed evolving perfume with a nice balance of opposing directions that begins sharply with soaring rose and soon becomes a comfortable nest of dry musky leaf and woods. Rating: 8.5/10.