Dua's Vanillac Aoud

Like warm biscuits by the fire... I love this fragrance! It's so warm and comforting in the way that the vanilla comes across as warm biscuits (cookies) by the fire. It feels very much like smelling gingerbread biscuits but with sugary coconut and vanilla instead of the ginger. I heard that the brief for this was to create a replacement for the rose-oud combination, where rose is the most common ingredient combined with oud in traditional middle-eastern fragrances. Here vanilla is the dance partner to the oud. The oud here is not smoky or medicinal or animalic/"barnyard" in any way (apparently the oud here is from Thailand - a Thai oud). I find the fragrance mostly linear in development, I would say that it opens with a slightly alcoholic vanilla absolute note (like vanilla extract) which is backed up by the ylang-ylang. This then softens, melting down into a warm, gourmand-like, cosy sugary vanilla-coconut biscuit (there is also a roasted tonka beans note which adds to this vibe). That's why to me it's like having warm vanilla biscuits by the fire in cold weather, which to me is autumn and winter. I love the creativity here, and I think that Dua do a good job here mixing gourmand notes with an oud base (however many Middle Eastern/Arabian houses do this, like Swiss Arabian ). I would also look forward to trying and exploring more oud and vanilla combinations as I find them intriguing (and I am getting a little tired of the continuous rose & oud combination fragrances).