Santal Basmati

A very finely blended and sumptuous sandalwood study. I just needed some time to really conclude my reviews of the house of Affinessence and found it hardest to review Santal Basmati. I am an enthusiast of sandalwood as I find it the most noble and benchmark woody note in my personal opinion implemented in perfumery. Perfect for my tastes in woody fragrances along with rosewood and palo santo. To me sandalwood is the perfect woody note and ever since acquiring Costume National Homme, to me a masterful sandalwood and a masterful designer perfume in general, I have been a fan of sandalwood and its behavior in fragrances. I am habitual in seeking the woody material particularly when I want to try new brands. Sandalwood is a very nuanced and complex ingredient intriguing in its profile because its rich organic facets can suggest many things other than wood, like milk, butter, mildew, human body odors, bread, oats, powder, soap, clay, stone, dust etc. Sandalwood can have so many personalities and has been in perfumery since the origins of precious oils, incenses and alchemy. Sandalwood is a hemiparasitic meaning it partially feeds from other host plants. Its roots possess tube-like structures designed to seek other flora and "steal" nutrients from their root systems. Sandalwood's origins begin in many places in the tropics like the peninsular regions of the Indian subcontinent, Malaysia and the Mekong Peninsula, the Regions of Southern and East Africa such as Zimbabwe, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya, the Indonesian Archipelago and Australia and the Pacific Islands. Sandalwood has made its merry way via incense trade on the Silk Road to Arabs and Persians in the Middle East and Europeans through the trade hub of the Italian Peninsula and to the Chinese and Japanese in the north east establishing itself as a staple in precious incenses and essences in antiquity. Santal Basmati is to me an excellent sandalwood. Extremely well balanced much like Vanille Benjoin and Cedre Iris but this one is my personal favorite from the brand. It is both well designed with a complementary rice note and it satisfies my craving for my favorite material. Santal Basmati is for when I want a simple, pleasing and comforting sandalwood centric composition, nothing more and nothing less. It also has a sophistication about it that makes it wearable in professional situations. Santal Basmati starts as a dry and steamed woody embrace that has sandalwood's mildewy or animalic nuances smoothed out becoming a profile of steamed and buttered rice creating a kind of yellow-ish savory characteristic. The balance of both rice and sandalwood is perfect where through the dry down, Santal Basmati holds control of both of the complex notes and stays strictly in the middle as a sophisticated marriage of the two. Rice is not too strong and neither is the sandalwood. Upon drying down Santal Basmati becomes richer. The complexity of the Mysore sandalwood and the basmati rice accord become starchy, exposing gourmand characteristics. Santal Basmati becomes a lightly sweetened and delicate warm bowl of rice pudding or condensed milk. The profile of this smell is creamy, white, fluffed, sweet, soft and viscous. Orris and patchouli add a very much needed creamy, earthiness and density to ground the scent making it more realistic. I'm going to be honest I have no idea what cashmeran smells like but in this blend it probably does something magical. Brilliant balance and a realistic featuring of the ingredients can be found in Santal Basmati. Even though I love it more I would say this is probably equal to Vanille Benjoin for being the most well-blended in the line in my humble opinion. I have eaten basmati rice for most of my life so I'm quite familiar with its smell. I have also eaten rice pudding in Turkey a very typical Middle Eastern dessert. I learned to make it myself after having loved eating it in Turkey. I absolutely love this entry into the Affinessence line it really does smell of rice and sandalwood to me. It blossoms off of my skin well as it coccoons me in the earthy, fatty and gourmand nuances of sandalwood in an understated and smart way. The downsides I can see about this composition are that it does come across as quite simplistic and minimalist which will undoubtedly deter many people and is unconvincing of its high price. It is somewhat derivative because if you've gone through many compositions that use sandalwoods like santalum album (Indian sandalwood specifically the species found in Mysore), muhuhu (East African sandalwood), santalum spicatum (Australian sandalwood), Santalum austrocaledonicum (New Caledonian Sandalwood), synthetic javanol or creamy styled woods like, rosewood, lignum vitae, oak, palo santo or buddha wood, you may have already smelled this done with much more enticing complexity elsewhere. As it stands I am a sandalwood lover and Santal Basmati, being as simple as it is, is inspiring and finally a sandalwood without all the fluff or the bells and whistles. Although honestly speaking I'm sure this profile can still be done even better and I look forward to trying that sandalwood whatever, where ever it may be. At the moment however this remains the sandalwood centric composition I have been searching for for a long time and I am extremely eager to obtain it for my collection. This is what I wanted Vientiane from The Providence Perfume Company to smell like. It does try to resemble the smoothness of this, however that fragrance gets too dry, chemically and screechy on my skin with all of the added musks and fixatives for performance. Though, do try Vientiane, it may work for you and may seem as the better performing counter part to Santal Basmati but I'm sure you'll notice some stark differences. I do honestly find this to be the better blended sandalwood but not eventful enough a difference to warrant costing this much. I have real Mysore sandalwood oils and yes it is here, although there is obvious decoration to domesticate it and westernize its smell and improve its performance. Santal Basmati is very comforting and wispy. Unisex. A thin profile but with great lasting ability on me and great sillage as well even though many seem to find it poor performing. This is a case with soft woods as well as with the real Mysore sandalwood. For most people's smell receptors the complexities of these soft woods are quite quiet and subject to anosmia. This is similar to habits of their synthetic molecule counterparts like, javanol, firsantol, sandaxol, and iso-e super. Test Santal Basmati out! I will be keeping my eye on this house as their new "Top-notes" collection will be dropping sometime in October of this year on the writing of this. I for one am looking forward to this. Be on the lookout 👀. Great collection now and great releases, I'm sure, on the horizon. 9.5/10

Absolutely stunning sandalwood - sweet, soft, persistent, completely classy and gloriously natural. The soft puffs of basmati aren't cereal-ish or toasty-grain like, just another layer of fluffy feathery sweetness, making the whole even more soothing and snuggly. Among the very very best of the hundreds (literally) of "santal" scents I've tried - and really one of the closest to perfection, in all honesty. Nothing fake, harsh, over-cloying or nearly-sweaty about it, no matter how far into the day it goes. The flowery notes just accentuate the wood, rather than competing with it. I don't smell any real resemblance to SL Santal Majuscule or Guerlain Santal Royal, as it has none of SM's barnstorming, really very dominant cocoa or SR's leather or the rose in both of those others. Santal Basmati is miles more discreet, yet IMHO even better, than either - always sticking to the sweeter gentler side rather than the masc-savoury facet of sandalwood, yet never ever getting sickly. Perceptibly, yet adorably, classy and elegant and a cut above. Also lasts, for an impressively long time, in the same glorious form - up to 8h (though faintly after 6 or so) on skin, and way beyond on fabrics. So it is so nearly transcendent... and yet... it's *horribly* priced, and while it's everything that's good about sandalwood, there are dozens and dozens of 'nearly like it' things at mere fractions of the price. I'd feared that this would be absolutely unique and marked out by an inimitable note of basmati which made it unmistakeable. But it's not quite as special as it thinks it is. So I end up conflicted: I truly don't know whether to feel smitten by it, or agonised that I can't afford it (hmmm, probably not - if I want to spend *that* much on a sandalwood scent I'd probably just set fire to my bank account and buy SL Santal de Mysore instead), or just pleased I got the chance to smell it once and cross it off the list. At discount, this would be a totally done deal. Aesthetically it does the business with complete aplomb. At RRP though, eeesh, it's a tiny bit too little impact for far too much money. Oh Affinessence. I love you for making this but it's out of my league. ETA: of course I did it (second hand and at discount) and it's now one of those 100% guaranteed comfort-luxury choices for hard, ugly days when I need a scent to caress and reassure me.

This is a simplistic yet sublime homage to sandalwood and a delightfully delicate demonstration of how the scent of rice can be such a comforting and relaxing scent. Personally, I like to use this perfume at nighttime as a bedtime scent, or when I'm feeling fragile, to bring about a sense of serenity and security. There's just something magical about the way the notes in this perfume harmonise together that makes me feel loved and cared for. I know that sounds absurd now that I've written it... but I seriously feel at peace when I spray this about. It feels almost like I can go right the way back and remember how I felt whilst being cradled by my own mother as an infant. I sleep so well when I use this in the evening; like a baby! On one hand I do wish it lasted a lot longer and was stronger with its projection, even though I do get ongoing sporadic sweet whafts from spraying myself and bed linen. However, on the other hand, I also appreciate the quietness and meditative side of it. This is like an otherwordly or ancient chant, a primitive lullaby where each part takes a while to reach me, much like the pauses between the waves breaking on the shore, or the pause between the inhaling and exhaling of uour breath. There is silence and anticipation with this one which, in a way, is part of the perfume's character. Dare I call a perfume angelic? I would use this every night if it was cheaper and I despair at rhe thought it may one day mot be possible to own a bottle of it. I do think it's a very unique perfume that any fragrance fanatic should try at one point in their journey.

#1132 in my "Tour de Fragrance" I have almost no experience with rice as a fragrance component. Kilian "Moonlight in Heaven" is the only one I can think of, and that's a very different scent than this. Basmati is kinda like carrot seeds and papyrus notes in adding an dry quality to the scent. I'm very much sold on papyrus. Carrot seeds I'm sort of indifferent to. Not sure how I feel about basmati other than at the Indian restaurant buffet. But I definitely like the sandalwood, iris, cashmeran and patchouli here. I'm not sure the rice is adding anything I can't do without, but it's not spooling the scent either, and it's a unique scent for sure, or at least not like any of the hundreds of scents I've experienced so far. I really like this scent, as I do most Affinescence scents, but I don't really like the Affinescence pricing pf $300 for this fragrance. And in any case this isn't my favorite of all the sandalwood focused scents I've tried. You have all the usual suspects that have sandalwood scents like Le Labo, Kilian, Tom Ford, Amouage, Xerjoff that are all priced out of a lot people's comfort zone. But I think L'Orchestre's "Piano Santal" is a better sandalwood scent overall for $120 than "Santal 33", "Sacred Wood", or any of the other niche houses, and less than half the price of those scents. That said, I don't think this is a good bet for office wear, but certainly for date night. Great performance overall. But you can do better for less.

Okay. I have finally saved my money for this beauty. I've tried it like three years ago and fell in love instantly, but it was just too expensive for me. Thank god, they've started to sell 50ml bottles and I got it on discount so you can imagine how excited I was. But I am disappointed, it is SO weak. The spritzer is odd, it's so soft, like puffs of air, I had to apply like 6 times to finally feel the juice I have been longing for for so long. (don't know, maybe 100ml bottle has different spritzer) And after 30mins I almost cannot feel it anymore. I will wait and see what happens, also try it in different weather, but first impression is not good. My samples had good power and on my skin, it was really beautiful: creamy sandalwood with great basmati note. It had kind of woody milkiness that I love and it was totally unique. Without aggressive patch that some people are talking about, iris also stayed way in the back. I hope I will find a way to find that again with my full bottle. EDIT: Maybe I am just not living in a place with a suitable weather for this perfume. I was on my vacation in Canary Islands this winter and used Santal Basmati there, never smelled better. Amazing scent, at times wants to be a little artificial, but all in all very unique. The basmati note finally got to shine along with silky sandalwood...