Fig Aoudii

Seduction is the register, and the fruit carries it.

Violet goes in delicate and powdery against the fig. Amber sweetens it without thickening it. Agarwood arrives last and will not leave, and that is the difference between carnal and merely soft.

The main naturals, most of them named for where they come from: orris, Virginia cedar, Malaysian calamus, New Caledonian sandalwood, Haitian vetiver, Somalian incense, clove and celery. The animal in it is a set of accords, Tonkin musk and civet and castoreum, and not the materials themselves.

Maison Incens is a French house built out of a book. Philippe Constantin was born in Cameroon to a French father and a Moroccan mother, grew up in Casablanca, and went to France at eighteen to study economics and international law. The plan was an international organisation and work for people in need. Meeting Jean Claude Gigodot ended that. The house is named for Constantin's father, who left behind a compilation of paintings on leather and stories told in smell.

The releases are the olfactory signature of that book. Each belongs to an opus in the story of Artganis, an unknown civilisation whose life is ruled by smell. The Artganians travel and bring back what they find, and the opuses follow them: their own endemic essences, then the Morocco they settled in, then the divinatory arts they watched, then the legendary earthly materials themselves.