Shadee
Sultan Pasha (2012)

Originally composed as a blend to commemorate his fifth wedding anniversary, Sultan Pasha has since issued several versions of Shadee (meaning ‘wedding’ in Sanskrit), each with a slightly different top note. Both samples I tested (Shadee Version 1 and Shadee Version 2) open with a strange but alluring smell of floor wax and boot polish, making me think of a combination of ylang absolute and iris, neither of which feature in this blend. Instead, Shadee has been designed around a duet of gardenia and jasmine, both florals present in the form of different species and extraction methods. When smelled in high concentration, some floral absolutes and enfleurages can lose their typical ‘floral’ characteristics normally represented in modern commercial perfumery – creaminess or sweetness, for example – and instead bring all their weirder, less floral attributes to the party. Therefore, ylang can smell like bananas and burning plastic, jasmine can smell like gasoline and grape chewing gum, some violet aromachemicals can smell like cucumber, iris can smell like raw potato and proving bread, calycanthus can smell like blackberry wine, and so on.

Such is clearly the case here – the boot polish, fuel-like aspects of pure jasmine oil are magnified in Version 2, whereas the grass-fed, slightly saline mushroom aspect of gardenia is pushed to the front in Version 1. Neither version is particularly floral in smell at first, despite the massive overload of floral absolutes. In both, there is a dusty hay-like note, reminiscent of the flat, almost stale spiciness of turmeric or saffron. This is actually in keeping with the theme of an Indian-style wedding, where the bride typically has intricate henna designs painted onto her hands and arms before the ceremony.
The final version of Shadee is the most beautiful and the most rounded. It opens with the earthy, mushroom-like salinity of Version I’s gardenia up front, but the spicy, leathery Sambac jasmine of Version 2 is there too, playing a subtle background role. The two floral absolutes intertwine sensuously, flowing into one earthy, spicy, honeyed accord. Again, there is nothing overtly floral about these pure floral enfleurages. Rather, they display a dark, chestnut-honey tenor more aligned with earth and leather than a flower. The creaminess of the blend intensifies with the addition of a very good sandalwood, but it is also generously spiced with the astringent herbs and botanicals of a traditional Indian shamama, such as saffron, henna, turmeric, and a host of other unknown ingredients, but which may include spikenard, kewra, or cinnamon bark. Towards the end, a slightly dank musk accord pulls the earthy, spicy, creamy floral into the undergrowth.

Shadee exemplifies what I think makes Sultan Pasha such a good perfumer. He looks at a theme and takes the less obvious route towards expressing it. The Shadee attar could have been a crude, spicy caricature of an Indian wedding (more Bollywood than real life) but this is refined, waxy, and slightly strange in the best way imaginable. In its marriage of earth, spice, and flowers, Shadee approaches the orbit of traditional Indian attars such as majmua or shamama but ultimately spins away in a different direction. It is, in some way, complimentary to Sultan Pasha’s other Indian-inspired attar, Shamama, in that they both draw from a rich Indian cultural heritage of attar-making, but ultimately divert to a more Arabian-inspired finish of animalic musks, resins, or precious woods.

Shadee to me is one of the most relaxing, meditative, and pure fragrances among the Sultan Pasha offerings - and simultaneously one of the most pure representations of the divine character of the feminine. To me, the notion of this divine representation accords this fragrance honorable, and archaic motherly tonality - although not restricted to women to wear, for its character is such that a male could easily wear this, but just such that the grace and divinity of the mother as a symbolic figure are deeply instilled in this fragrance to my subjective history.

This fragrance starts off with a bang of Gardenia, Jasmine and Tuberose dancing atop a swirling lush rose and a base of Tumeric, Musk, Sandalwood and Ambergris with occasional spicier elements coming from something that reminds me of an aromatic blend I have once smelled that centered around mustard oil with a slew of other spices underneath (not necessarily as the mustard you put on your sandwich, but mustard which is blended deeply into a smoky aroma - one which smells somewhat of an 'oriental' incense) as well as a milky/slightly earthy aroma which could very well be milk, or patchouli of some aged variety blended into perfection.

Another aspect of this fragrance of awe-inspiring note is the lasting power of the floral notes on display here, as well as their fullness and delicacy, which are never compromised for the sake of this lasting power. This is even more amazing when you notice that, each floral note here dances in such perfect coordination with the other floral notes displaying each other at altering moments, and yet you never lose sight of the totality of their dance. For me, the gardenia and jasmine (paired with the tuberose) have 'solos' which prominently display the undying resilience of femininity in its eternal beauty - the jasmine and tuberose step forward to create this wonderfully rich - taking the depth and richness of the jasmine which acts ass the bass to the tenor quality which the tuberose here takes on, joining the two through a quality which sings of the infinite, in a cool, white, regal manner, through which one finds the sweetness of the jasmine offset by the gentle headiness of the tuberose, which create this wonderful commentary on the visual beauty of purity, one which covers its soft and elegant qualities, and yet which sing to the dedication and sacred qualities which allow for its individual cultivation.

Shadee also does this wonderful trick, whereupon a lot of us who have smelled 'gardenia' in a great deal of works outside of high end natural perfumery have in fact really smelled a fusion of jasmine, tuberose and orange blossom in some indeterminate combination, and yet, in the middle of the unending beauty of Shadee, where the dancing florals have fully switched parts, and while you think that you may still be smelling jasmine and tuberose together, really they have retreated to the background, and the gardenia stands now at the fore even somehow more pure than the florals which welcomed it in - it's still soft, delicate, cool, and opulent, but now boasting an even deeper creaminess, boosted in part by the sandalwood and that milk/patchouli accord I spoke of earlier - which also seem to pair with the earthy and semi-mushoom-like-quality.

Truly, I must say, having spent quite some time with Shadee, that it's splendor is unending, and in fact might very well be among the most pure, divine and archetypal (in the Jungian sense) that I have ever put my nose to - which is saying an awful lot in that, it never loses this sense of delicacy and simplicity while staying so richly complex and thought/awe inducing.

9/10

YT: Jess AndWesH