The moment you open the bottle of Borneo Sultan you are met with a beautiful, light, verdant green jungle note. It is almost luminous, nearly bright, on the borderline of floral but never quite tipping over. The closest thing we have to a verbal handle is sweet vetiver — if such a thing existed in nature. It compels deep inhalation simply because it is that pleasant.
This is an archetypal Borneo oil from Indonesia. On the skin, a wonderful green incense note unfolds with a hint of peppery spice. There is a quality that brushes against the mentholic, almost the eucalyptus, but never with the camphorous hardness that those notes often bring. Everything stays soft. Everything stays in motion.
That green incense character is, frankly, approaching Qi Nam dragon-note territory. It is one of the highest compliments we can pay to a Borneo oil, and we are not making it loosely. This is high-calibre material, and it deserves to be regarded as such by anyone serious about Indonesian oud.
A supremely pleasant oil, and one of the finest Indonesian distillations we have ever offered and would command a plus $1000 price. If you are working your way through the great Borneo profiles, this is one of the bottles we would put in front of you first. Absolutely insane offer for the price.
Borneo, Indonesia. 2019
Available in a 2.5g bottle
At Kinana, artisanal fragrance means perfumery made by hand, in small batches, by makers who answer to their materials rather than to a production schedule. Where an industrial scent is engineered for consistency and scale — built to smell identical across millions of bottles, to a tightly controlled cost, favouring synthetic bases and standardised accords — an artisanal one is composed with care around genuine naturals and well-chosen isolates, accepting the small variations that come with real ingredients rather than smoothing them away. It favours quality and provenance over yield: real oud rather than an oud-like accord, materials chosen for their character, and compositions given time to rest and mature. Our purpose at Kinana is to bring that craft within reach — fragrance with depth and individuality, revealing itself gradually on the skin and carrying the character of what it was made from, rather than a uniform impression produced at scale.
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