Xerjoff - XJ Oud Stars - Ceylon

Xerjoff - XJ Oud Stars - Ceylon

A rare and true black tea fragrance embroidered with droplets of dusky honey, jasmine petals, agarwood, and pearls of sandalwood, Xerjoff's new fragrance, Ceylon, is an exotic memento of spice traders arriving in Venice to offload their wares. Imagine grand wooden caskets, carved from the finest reddish-gold Mysore sandalwood, opened up to reveal mounds of dried black tea leaves in all their mouth-watering richness, curiously dry but fragrant. Other caskets open to reveal long, carved husks of Malaysian agarwood, thickly veined with the black oily resin of oud and thickly redolent of smoke, leather, spice, and earth. These treasures of nature send out their pungent, wonderful aromas into the air, already densely spiced with indolic jasmine garlands brought from the subcontinent, ripe and close to rotting on the vine.

The result of these heady, mingling aromas is Xerjoff Ceylon. Sweet, musky, woody, and floral in turn, this is a quixotic fragrance that displays all the exoticism of places we've only visited in our minds. It is the faraway breath of the Orient, wrapped up in scent form. Beautiful and oddly moving.