Highness X Brown Eau de Parfum 100ml

Seven materials, arranged with no waste at all, is the case for Afnan Highness X Brown Eau de Parfum 100ml, and the surprise is where the sweetness sits. Tonka bean is in the opening, which is not where you expect to find it. It gives the first minutes a warm, slightly bitter sweetness close to marzipan, and it is set against bergamot, perfumed and bitter at the rind, and blackcurrant, which is tart and sharply green with an almost sour bite. That combination of sweet and sour in the first thirty seconds is the whole hook.

The middle is dry and earthy and arrives quickly. Vetiver smells of dry soil, smoke and cut grass stems, with a bitter nuttiness underneath, and patchouli is darker and damper beside it. There is no floral stage at all, which is unusual and keeps the fragrance moving in one direction. Guaiac wood and musk finish it. Guaiac is smoky and faintly tarry with a sweetness of its own, almost like burnt sugar on charred timber, and musk softens the whole thing onto the skin so the last hours are warm rather than harsh. The sweet thread from the opening comes back here, which gives the composition a satisfying symmetry and makes the short run of materials feel deliberate rather than thin. Dating from 2021, it is an eau de parfum and it behaves like one: eight hours or more on skin, with proper projection through the first hour and a closer, quieter presence after that. It is marketed to men, it belongs to cold weather and the evening rather than to a summer morning, and one spray on each side of the neck is enough for anybody.

Afnan is a fragrance house from the United Arab Emirates, founded in 2007, that develops and produces its own compositions in the Emirates instead of licensing its name from a designer.