Indu Kush / Hindu Kush
by AbdesSalaam Attar Profumo

This is the sort of fragrance that makes me think: "Ah! There you are." It revives memories of a time hen I wore patchoulis, musks, and sandalwoods, and when everyone burned incense. Yet it does not have that thick, earnest, linear, "head-shop" character.

The beauty of Hindu Kush for me is how it manages to be rich but dry, dry but cozy, cozy but airy, airy but assertive, assertive but graceful. As a result, it warms in the winter and cools in the summer.

The weather is very hot and humid now. A dry scent is just the ticket. Often the fragrances associated with summer (green and aquatic scents, especially) can be actually quite syrupy, and a bit clumsy. Not Hindu Kush. It defies gravity.

Hindu Kush is an appealing spicy Oriental fragrance and an all-natural frankincense perfume that anyone who likes incense ought to love. It starts with a conglomoration of exotic spices, both pungent and sweet, each appearing quickly at different intervals. The incense is high-quality and rich. At the base is a thick, deep labdanum--a dark amber--smelling of wood and, in combination with the spices, a bit smoky with subtle, maple nuances. Altogether, it creates a mystical, adventurous, rather sexy fragrance.

Quarry has written an absolutely fabulous commentary on Hindu Kush! For me, I get the initial blast of green - almost camphorous - which disappears almost as mysteriously as it came...yet somehow, it leaves a residual green that combines with dry woods and incense. Maybe because I'm sampling it during a 18 degree blustery winters' snow, it feels like the dry & cozy warmth of a small cabin whose only source of heat is a woodburner! I find this association quite charming. It's character reminds me somewhat of Juozas Statkevicius' fragrance, sans flowers. My personal preferences don't usually run in the direction of incense based fragrances, but I find myself intrigued and impressed!

My notion of new-sawn wood is vastly different from yours, I'm sure. I expect your experiences harken from freshly cut trees or home-improvement-center lumber or year-old firewood. Whereas the most impressionable wood from my life is much older, as are the buildings and furnishings that make up our home. Even as my dear husband renovates our house, he's using lumber harvested generations ago and stored through most of the 1900s by my frugal father. The green vapors have dissipated from this stuff; it is tightly grained, resin-sweet, and musty-dusty in a good way. To my mind, this kind of wood is the primary ingredient in Hindu Kush. Its creator talks of "taking a walk in an Indian market, where clouds of incense smoke escape through the open doors of temples to be mixed with the perfumes of the east, ginger, cumin, nutmeg and pepper." Not having any experiences like that, I associate HK's secondary accord to be like walking past the open door of a Penzeys Spices store--there's just that general melange of comforting scents--not firey, not sharp. And this, my friends, is the totality of Hindu Kush: simplicity, beauty, timelessness, and without gender. Unlike any other of the hundreds of bottled fragrances I've smelled, I want to draw in HK's scent deeply, like you would steam from a pungent soup or narcotic smoke. It feels like you should breath Hindu Kush, and I suppose at least part of that is due to its being composed of natural ingredients.

When I first sampled HK from a bottle with a reducer opening, I thought the scent faded away too quickly, but once I applied it from an atomizer and allowed the overspray to hit my cuffs, I was rewarded with hours and hours of aroma. Now, having gotten to know the scent over many days, I can find only one drawback to wearing it: I am too contented. Where other fragrances may make me kick up my heals or swoon or smile, Hindu Kush will let me settle and feel lazy, wistful. So it isn't a workday fragrance--at least not a workday where you actually want to get anything accomplished.

An interesting phenomenon arrived with this bottle: My husband asked to wear this fragrance, and asked again. So I've split the scent between us, and it's the only one we share in this way. Of course he forgets the name and calls it The Sawdust One. He's also fascinated by the hay scent sold by Profumo.it, while I think my favorite sample yet may be the Scents of the Soul Oak Moss.

To further sell you on sampling from this perfume house, know that it was the only natural perfume source Luca Turin included in The Guide, giving Hindu Kush four stars and labeling it "resinous oakmoss," the floor-wax-and-church-incense start of Mitsouko.