Rose de Jamal asks you to rethink this iconic perfume note, long consigned in the mainstream perfume imagination as something stodgy, old fashioned, and too conventionally feminine. And one whiff of it will have you feeling, to borrow a song lyric, like a perfume virgin, sniffing rose as if for the very first time.
Its avant-garde construction by perfumer Antoine Lie takes the Moroccan damascena rose absolute at its heart far away from its classical use, thanks largely to its pairing with a special Moroccan “Naneh” mint, a variety of spearmint especially sweet and aromatic and used in Moroccan drinks and teas. Although this mint might move Rose de Jamal toward a “masculine” fougère, it perhaps ideally helps to deconstruct any ingrained ideas of gender in rose, producing only the more perfume-centric thought, This is beautiful.
Rose de Jamal is also unusual for its massive 5.5% dose of Moroccan rose absolute. In addition there are 500 grams of freshly harvested rose buds per bottle of Rose de Jamal — the equivalent of more than 100 roses. Smelling Rose de Jamal might also produce the feeling of smelling rose for the very first time, Lie has suggested in interviews, because its realness is radically different from the scent of synthetically constructed rose accords in most perfumes with rose. The rose here is lush, velvety, almost suede-like, subliminally pulling you into its mysterious heart even as you might only be smelling its lush beauty.
What also makes Rose de Jamal special is its name: named after the Les Indémodable exclusive partner in Morocco, Jamal Chaboun, who produces this special Rose harvest (among other ingredients). Jamal owns his plantations, controls the crops, and has mastered extraction processes.
“Jamal loves his business and is very proud of his raw materials, ” Lie said in an interview. “We decided to make a perfume homage to the gentleman, to take him from the shadows.”
