Midnight Quarters (ROUND 3)
Let’s workshop this poem about the many hips history finds it unsafe to name—hips that, although dressed up in the archives as Wakanda resistance, kicked up wet-ass plumes of climactic fecality.
scent of the day: Chypre Sultan Qidori, by Ensar Oud
While not antique in the way that we get from Areej, this is definitely a classic chypre in my view. Here we get green coolness against animal warmth, bitterness against cream, earth against incense. The opening avoids the familiar lemon-bright gateway and instead leans into an uncanny floral-green freshness, one that feels shaded rather than luminous, as if light were being filtered through dense foliage. This green carries a cooling effect, comparable to the chilled, meditative greenness found in Tigerwood 91.
Moss, musk, and sandalwood establish the core identity of the scent. The oakmoss is substantial and bitter: aged, slightly dusty, and deeply textural. Sandalwood moves through this bitterness with a creamy softness, preventing the green from becoming brittle and lending the composition a distinctly old-world poise. There is something unmistakably classical here, not in the sense of imitation, but in the confidence to allow bitterness and density to remain unresolved. At early moments, a faint suggestion of amberwood synthetics liuek we get in Sultan Pasha releases echo—and yes, this fragrance is powerful.
The Mongolian musk is pivotal. It does not announce itself as overt animality I guess. Instead, it evokes petrichor: damp soil after rain, mineral-rich earth releasing scent as it cools. This gives the fragrance an atmospheric depth rather than a bodily one, reinforcing the idea that Qidori is about place more than skin. The musk fuses with the moss to create a sensation of humidity and age, as if the perfume were exhaling from within the forest floor itself. Oud materials reinforce this effect, not as dark smoke or barnyard force, but as green-resinous density that feels alive and vegetal—I mean, I almost feel iriz-rhizome rootiness. I don;t know though.
In the deep drydown, the moss becomes leathery and dusty and bitter. It si not like the Irish Spring of Mouse Illuminee. Although both are leathery, the Ensar is much less soapy and much more dark. The sandalwood and the musk serve as the difference maker here. Much more dramatic in composition than the Rogue.
Midnight Quarters We lie too hard to face those shame-sweet nights when teen-chattel cake—treacherous in its clapback to master thrusts—surged (under that fooling-nobody theater of “No!”) into a pissy gallop, a feculent fury historians tidy as “defiance”: “Lawd-a-massi. Uuhn!”