...there were small amber-tinted glass bottles, scores of them, and as we spoke he would take one up, open the top, hand it to me and invite me to smell the contents. This went on for hours. It was why I’d come: to meet Dominique Dubrana, a 54-year-old Frenchman living in Italy, a Sufi convert, a grand eccentric and a genius of sorts.
— From Smellbound at the New York Times, an article about Dominique Dubrana of La Via del Profumo. If you missed it, see Kevin's review of Mecca Balsam.
Middle Eastern perfumes are intense and often leave a trail behind the wearer that a well-trained, or even a lazy, dog can track for days. Hansel and Gretel should have ditched the breadcrumbs and worn an Arabian fragrance to find their way back home. (sniff, sniff…“We came THIS way!”) One either adores such perfumes, or shuns them. I adore them and that’s appropriate with the new La Via del Profumo Balsamo della Mecca because adoration was part of its creation: it was inspired by a trip perfumer Dominique Dubrana took to Mecca during Hajj.
Balsamo della Mecca contains natural notes of cistus labdanum, frankincense, benzoin, agarwood, tonka bean, tobacco, Indian tuberose and Damask rose. Balsamo della Mecca begins with rich, ‘leather-y’ labdanum and smoky frankincense. As the fragrance develops, interesting facets emerge — accords that smell of unsweetened cinnamon, “cola” and musky tobacco. The fragrance is dense and only lightens after hours of wear when the notes seem to “dry out” and turn powdery — a lovely phase when frankincense and benzoin/tonka predominate…
Italian indie perfume house La Via del Profumo has launched Mecca Balsam / Balsamo della Mecca, a new fragrance inspired by a trip to Mecca:
In Mecca, the scents of Labdanum resin, of Benzoin, frankincense and of the precious Agar wood…
The first and only time I went to Italy I was sixteen, and on a six-week trip of Europe with a large group of girls who had fundraised for the trip through Girl Guides (Scouts). Using the blitzkrieg method of Old World sightseeing favored by many generations of North American young people, we “did” Italy by spending a day-and-a-half in Venice. It was high summer and with the callousness of youth, I wrote Venice off with a few lines in my travel diary: “It’s like a museum covered in pigeon poop. The canals smell of sewage, and there is a haze hanging over the water. No oilies as of yet.” This last bit was because our uniforms apparently made us look like an enormous gaggle of young stewardesses and so we attracted camps of hopeful, slick fellows most places we went. Despite their absence in Venice, I came away with an impression of the place that might have turned me into the sort of traveler who discouraged Kevin. The recent garbage strike in my hometown of Toronto has made me realize you can catch a city on a bad day (or month) — but even in 1993, years before my perfume obsession began, I was hypersensitive to smells, good and bad. As far as I was concerned, Italy stunk.
It was puzzling, though, that my parents kept returning there. “Table wines are cheaper than Coke,” my father explained, when I asked why they kept going back. (Perhaps this brief, thrift-related response helps clarify that my parents are not of Italian descent and therefore returning to visit the mother country; Scotland is the land of our fathers.) Since my parents are not enthusiastic photographers, I tried to determine the attraction of this region listening to stories of their travels…
Another one for the men: a shaving set from Geo F. Trumper with a Warwick Mach 3 razor and matching stand, a badger hair brush, a bottle of their Sandalwood cologne, Sandalwood shaving cream, and Sandalwood Hair & Body Wash for £195…