Musk Makkah

I haven't tested Mokhalat Dubai, but Musk Makkah shares some similarities with Saat Safa as well as Dehn Al Oud. A blast of chilling camphor, with piquant cumin. Like Icy Hot; cold and then warm. Beneath these elements is a deeply green, pungent, rotting rose. It's very woody, with cedar, patchouli, oakmoss, the oud is leathery & phenolic. It's medicinal, I think incense. Warm and peppery musks. What a bizarre mystery. There are so many different facets to this dense oil that go unaccounted for by the notes list. I will need to revisit it periodically to see if I notice anything new. Concentrated, dense, strong, long lasting. If you are sensitive, a small dab is sufficient, any more could trigger a headache. The color of the oil is a deep brown, it stains clothing. It smells like a blend of naturals and synthetics. I'm inclined to class it as a "swamp" chypre, similar to Saat Safa, but Musk Makkah is even more dense and sophisticated. The thought that most people only know Al-Rehab for their designer dupes and cutesy gourmands, when they also make weird, avant-garde oils like this... Hilarious. I've become obsessed with their middle eastern style oils, and this one is marvelous. I don't wear it very often because it's so strong, but I absolutely adore it. If you buy through the Al-Rashad website, these oils are about $6 for 6 ml. Less costly than most other retailers. This is one of the strangest and most challenging oils from the brand. If you crave STRANGE and UNIQUE, I highly recommend testing it out.

Incredible fragrance that has the color of iodine and opens medicinal. If you ever smelled ''paan or gutkha,'' a type of chewing tobacco made of betel nut and spices, this opens exactly like that smell. Not for the faint-hearted. As the top settles, you get tutti-frutti-scented butcher shop floor with the addition of animal fur and coal tar. Think of a deer skin floating through the Varanasi waters of the Ganges River next to a funeral pyre of a recently deceased elderly aghori man lathered in dark herbs. Soaked with antiseptic midnight spices and heavy smoke emanate the musky air. A very Middle Eastern type of scent, it's very Islamic with a distinctive cultural identity. Extremely masculine, with no floral, bright, sweet, or aquatic notes. The transitions are musky, fecal, spices, fur-like, and medicinal resins. If you've seen the petrified corpse of a bog person, this is what its skin would smell like. Incredible fragrance that can be sold for hundreds of dollars from a niche house. You might get compliments; you might get complaints, but this will get you noticed. Masterpiece and not a safe blind buy if you don't like spicy, dry, animalistic, musky orientals. It's very complex, with a beautiful herbal amber base. 10/10.

The perfect perfume for those who want to smell like a morgue, old iodine bandages, a pharmacy, an abandoned Gothic church, and the iron fences of a cemetery. A long-lasting and pleasant scent, tart and sharp at first, with a sweet trail reminiscent of church incense. It lasts a very long time on skin, clothes, and hair. The downside is that it leaves a yellow, oily residue, so it only goes well with dark clothing. A perfect perfume for frosty winter and autumn, in the spirit of Tim Burton. I definitely recommend it to fans of gothic and true crime, for its price it’s very good, even more than just good, I’m delighted.

Just tried this again. Note the amber color of the oil...I got one in 2020 that was black and smelled of motor oil and static electricity! Must have been a fluke. This time I get a gorgeous dark and green rose, very much like the Swiss Arabian Mukhalat Malaki. Now I am a big fan and am so happy for giving it a second chance!

To me the opening smells quite similar to saat saafa minus the rose but the musk and oud smell pretty similar in this one, it's quite basic not my favourite al rehab but it's OK would more suite older generations I think.

And now for something completely different. Literally just picked this up, but it made a strong enough first impression that I was called to review. Wonderful reviews from shadymoss & Lovaloo that each capture parts of this perfectly. This is for sure old world, old-timey, apothecary medicine, and it's fascinating! Strongly herbal opening with a camphorous and piercing minty note. Somewhere between tiger balm, unsweetened mint chewing gum, and actual garden mint pulled from soil. Behind it is dry, dark brown "wood" and almost leathery natural base. A little soapy musk in there. Strangely dirty and clean simultaneously. I picture the man you buy potions and medicine vials from in the original NES Zelda smells like this. You know the one you have to enter a secret door in an 8-bit cave to visit. That or a 19th century doctors leather medicine briefcase, morphine, iodine and antiseptic vials and all. Highly recommended for anyone likes oddball scents, and is seeking something completely unique (at least to my western nose). Looking forward to exploring this one in depth, even if I'm not quite sure how/where to pull it off outside of the home. This is almost what I expected Caron Yatagan to smell like.

I’ll edit and add to this review later, but as the first day I wanna say that I bought this thinking it was the El Nabil Musc Makkah, and reading the comments on those, I also think that some other reviewers did that too. I was expecting sweet but ofc it did smell like bathroom cleaner/ Comet at first, and the type of burning/screeching mercurial oud I noted when I first whiffed my first our fragrance, ‘Across Sands’. As it settles down you start to catch whorls of woods, rose-sage, and boiling herbal white florals.

Cheap oud. Spicy-woody. Zero florals. Unisex. Musk is neither clean nor dirty. Makkah is, apparently, an alternative spelling of Mecca.