Review of Serge Lutens Ambre Sultan: A Post-9/11 Truth

𝘍𝘳𝘰𝘮 𝘢 𝘳𝘢𝘸 𝘊𝘩𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘨𝘰 𝘤𝘭𝘢𝘴𝘴𝘳𝘰𝘰𝘮 𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘲𝘶𝘪𝘦𝘵 𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘢𝘩𝘢𝘳𝘢, 𝘩𝘰𝘸 𝘢 𝘭𝘦𝘨𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘢𝘳𝘺 𝘧𝘳𝘢𝘨𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘦𝘹𝘱𝘰𝘴𝘦𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘪𝘭𝘭𝘶𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘞𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘯 𝘨𝘢𝘻𝘦.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

I walked into my news reporting class one completely normal Tuesday morning, sat down in front of a monitor, and sleepily began to type.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

The class had just started at 8:00 AM Chicago time when one of my classmates screamed. We all turned away from our screens and stared at her.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣
⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣
“A plane just flew into the World Trade Center,” she stammered, face white.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣
⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣
Two things stand out in my mind from that moment. The first was that the class immediately went into a state of pandemonium as we all began searching for news. The second was my teacher turning to me with a smirk. “Is it jihad?” he asked smugly. “Of course it’s not jihad,” I sputtered. But somehow I knew, with a sinking feeling, that even if it was not jihad to me, it might be to everyone else.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

A few minutes later, a second plane hit the other tower. Class was dismissed.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

I had decided to become a journalist, in part, out of a feeling of responsibility to defend Islam and Muslims from bigoted attacks and convey the reality. But as the months passed and Islamophobia began putting down deeper roots, I realized that my understanding of Islam and the Middle East was limited—and my ability to speak about it even more so. Arabic was the key. The Quran and the hadith literature lived entirely in that language. I wanted a direct conversation with the text, not a translation; a conversation that only listening directly to another can deliver.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

I applied to Middlebury College in Vermont, where students were forbidden from speaking anything but the language they were studying. As a beginner, I could barely pronounce the letters. It is a strange thing to learn a language through total immersion. Although the setting was beautiful, with green mountains cradling the campus, I felt continuously frustrated by my inability to say what I actually wanted to say. It is a kind of psychological pressure that is difficult to communicate. But by the end of the summer, I could construct simple sentences and had even begun dreaming in Arabic. All that pressure had thrown a switch in my brain.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

I first started thinking about Morocco around this time. The Arabic Language Institute in Fez (ALIF) had a stellar reputation for teaching classical Arabic. The country was also a US ally, meaning my country would not go to war with it. What I failed to perceive, however, was how non-Arabic Morocco would actually turn out to be.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

A few weeks after Middlebury, I touched down in Fez. When I noticed stray cats running through the airport terminal, I immediately knew I was out of my element.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐨𝐥𝐝𝐞𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐧 𝐚 𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐬𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐲𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐬

⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣Fez is a city with over 1,200 years of history and is a UNESCO World Heritage site. It is roughly divided into two parts: the new city, which mirrors any modern Western grid, and the old city, called the medina. Surrounded by high, ancient walls, the medina is a labyrinth of narrow alleys where cars cannot go. They are filled with bustling shops and side streets, where unassuming doors open into tiny artisanal studios or lavish homes built around central, hidden gardens. You never knew what lay behind a door. Any trip into the medina was almost certain to end in my getting lost, so tightly congested and meandering were the paths. We quickly learned that a dirham handed to a local child would safely lead us back out.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

In Fez, I felt connected to history in a way I never had in America, where an “old” building is just forty years old rather than four hundred.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

Most of all, the medina smelled ancient. Herbs and spices displayed in open sacks in the markets; amber resin traded in the narrow streets; incense burning at prayer time; the pungent, sharp odour of tanning chemicals in the leather district. All these scents drifted through the alleyways, settling into the stone in a way that suggested they had been doing exactly that for centuries.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

Growing up in a Pakistani household, the architecture of spice was ordinary to me. Bay leaf, coriander, cumin—these were as baseline as salt. What some Western fragrance reviewers call “challenging” or “medicinal” is, to my nose, simply Tuesday dinner. I mention this because it matters considerably for what follows.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

𝐀 𝐬𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐦 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐝𝐞𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

There is one moment from that year I have never forgotten: a student trip to the Sahara.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

Our minibus sped through small towns and endless fields of wheat before climbing across the Atlas Mountains, which separate Fez from the western edge of the desert. Once we crossed the peaks and began our descent, signs of human existence faded. Trees grew sparse, the air turned dusty, and a pervasive dryness took hold. We were all noticeably thirstier. As night fell and the bus drove deeper, the stars came out in a quantity I had never seen before—and haven’t seen since. The sky was saturated with them. Without light pollution, we could see what had always been there, just hidden. I fell asleep that night dreaming of Arabian nights and spirits made of fire, the jinn.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

Bright and early the next morning, we rode ornery camels across endless dunes to a desert camp, guided by Bedouins who navigated without any visible technology. We were meant to camp at a small oasis for the day, eating Moroccan food and watching the night sky.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣
Mother Nature, it seems, has a sense of humour.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

A sandstorm hit the camp an hour after we arrived. For a few of us, myself included, the romanticism vanished; we had had enough. Mounting our camels to return to the resort on the edge of the desert, we covered our eyes, ears, noses, and mouths with cloth from turbans our guides provided. It did little to prevent millions of grains of sand from infiltrating every bodily orifice. We couldn’t see further than a few metres, and the roaring wind drowned out all conversation. As we fell silent in fear, our guides simply laughed, walking forward as though nothing could be more natural.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

By the time I reached my room at the resort, I was completely exhausted by the alien experience. I threw myself onto the bed and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

I woke up around 2:00 AM. My nose felt heavy and strange. I gingerly touched a nostril, and sand poured out. I was thirstier than I had ever been in my life. After clearing my eyes, ears, and nose, I left my room in search of water.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

The resort’s dining hall was closed when I found it, but the entryway had no door. Inside, a fridge with a glass door, filled with large bottles of water, glowed in the dark. As desperately thirsty as I was, I didn’t take one. I saw no way to pay, and taking it felt like stealing. I sat down at a table, numbly staring at the glowing glass.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

At some point, I realized with a start that I was not alone. A Bedouin wrapped in traditional clothing was standing at the far end of the hall, watching me silently. I looked at him, my hard-earned Arabic completely failing me. Instead, I sent a silent thought across the room.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

𝘏𝘦𝘭𝘱.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

Wordlessly, the Bedouin walked over to the machine, pulled out a cold bottle of water, and handed it to me. I drank from it loudly, abandoning social niceties, praying Allah would bless this man and his progeny for perpetuity. I didn’t even notice when he left.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐝 𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐭⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

Almost twenty-four years later, I welcomed Serge Lutens Ambre Sultan into my collection. As my first highly lauded, amber-centric fragrance it filled a hole—widely considered one of the greatest amber scents ever composed, though not without controversy. I bought it because I wanted to experience peak amber from its definitive source, especially one famously said to recall a Moroccan souk, an environment I have a strong experience with.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

What I found did not confirm that, rather it surprised me.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

The marketing that follows this fragrance promises a bustling Moroccan spice market. All I will say is that I lived in Morocco, and that specific narrative as repeated about this fragrance is to my mind nothing more than a Western fantasy.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

The real Morocco is a country that can rain for six months straight, speaks French as fluidly as Arabic, and contains multitudes that no spice-market metaphor can hold. If you want that literal experience honestly bottled, Memo Paris African Leather delivers it; its spicy cardamom and cumin register is sharp, animalic and much more ethnically specific in a way that earns its geographic reference.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

Ambre Sultan makes no such claim on the real Morocco. In my opinion, it participates in an older tradition: the euro-centric imagined Orient—romantic, golden and untethered from the geography and people that actually exist there. But Ambre Sultan ultimately transcends that trope.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐢𝐭 𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐬𝐦𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐬 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

The opening is herbaceous—a brief, camphorous hit of bay leaf and Mediterranean herbs that announces itself and then quickly steps aside. To a nose trained on Pakistani cooking, these notes aren’t exotic. They are simply the smell of a kitchen where something careful is being prepared. That they strike some reviewers as medicinal or overwhelming tells me more about the cultural distance between those reviewers and the origins of these ingredients than it does about the juice itself. For me, spices are a starting point, not the final boss of perfumery.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣
⁣⁣⁣⁣

⁣What follows is a delicate, semi-sweet vanilla intermingled with angelica. It sits perfectly between sweetness and restraint—neither the aggressive, edible warmth of a gourmand nor the dry bitterness of something purely resinous. It doesn’t smell like food to me whatsoever; it smells like something that predates the very vocabulary we use to talk about flavour. Beneath it, the amber resins and benzoin create a powdery warmth that I can only describe as the smell of new life. I say that with complete intention.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

The morning my son came home from the hospital, he was powdery, warm, and filled my wife and me with a hope we could not yet name. I held him and wanted something better for him: a life of acceptance, of goodness, of seeing people as they actually are rather than through the labels taped onto them.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

Does Ambre Sultan smell like diapers, as some critics claim? That is neither right nor wrong; your nose will decide. To me, it is the honest smell of newness—of something that hasn’t yet been worn down by the world’s insistence on defining it before it has had a chance to speak.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

Ambre Sultan is a new beginning, not only for myself, but an entire genre of amber fragrances that came after it, even if it may not smell like amber itself.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

𝐁𝐞𝐲𝐨𝐧𝐝 𝐚𝐦𝐛𝐞𝐫⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

Ambre Sultan is obviously marketed as an amber fragrance, but on my skin, it radiates as much semi-sweet vanilla and powdery warmth as it does a traditional amber accord. Perhaps this is because “amber” in perfumery is itself a construction rather than a natural material. ⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣
⁣⁣⁣⁣

⁣If you were to go out into nature and smell real, raw fossilized tree amber, you would get nothing but a faint, dry, stony scent. If you lit it on fire you’d get a sharp, burning plastic smell. Obviously neither of those has any aromatic value in a bottle. But according to the fragrance industry amber tells a story about what warmth and resin 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 mean. Ambre Sultan agrees with that story just enough to be sold under its name, then deftly creates an entirely alternate reality.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

It’s not the most important thing to me as a fragrance lover, but that the performance is indeed robust is welcome. Is it in the vocabulary of the fragrance community, “beast mode”? Off of my skin, yes. After more than twelve hours, the fragrance is still clearly present, sitting closer to the skin toward its exit with the self-possessed stillness of something that knows exactly what it is and sees no reason to shout.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐨𝐟 𝐚𝐦𝐛𝐞𝐫𝐬?⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

A Bedouin I had never seen before, and would never see again, read my thirst without a single word spoken between us and handed me what I required. He didn’t explain himself. He didn’t perform generosity. He didn’t demand to know who I was or what I believed before offering comfort. He simply saw a human need, met it, and disappeared back into the shadows of a closed dining hall.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

In a way, Ambre Sultan operates with that same quiet, unvouched-for grace.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

When I look back at the twenty-four years that separate that sleepy Tuesday morning in Chicago from the day I brought this bottle home, I see a life spent navigating the heavy, clumsy boxes the world tries to build around us. I see a young journalist who ran all the way to the edge of the Sahara just to find a vocabulary to defend his faith from a smugly whispered accusation. I see a country—and a perfume industry—that too often prefers the comfortable romance of an “Orient” that never was over the complex, rain-soaked reality of what actually is.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

We are so desperate to label the bottle before we even taste the juice. We call a fragrance amber when it is actually an intricate tapestry of herbal medicine, resin, and vanilla. We look at a person and see a threat or a saviour, a translation instead of the direct text.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

But beneath all the noise, the light pollution of our collective fears and fantasies, the truth remains patient. The stars above the Sahara were always there; we simply couldn’t see them until the storm cleared and the artificial lights went dark.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

I feel that same stillness now when I wear this fragrance, and it is the exact same stillness when my child was born. I realized that new life doesn’t need a label to justify its existence. It doesn’t need to shout to be known. It just is. I wanted a world for my child that could look past the names taped onto the glass, a world that would see him as he actually is.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

Is Ambre Sultan’s name apt, the King of Ambers? As an amber perhaps, perhaps not—I can’t answer that so I will not try. What I can say is its royalty doesn’t come from a crown or a loud proclamation. It rules because, like that silent Bedouin in the middle of my Moroccan night long ago, Serge Lutens Ambre Sultan understands exactly what it is, provides exactly what is needed and sees no reason to explain itself to a world that is too busy defining it to truly listen.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

𝐒𝐞𝐫𝐠𝐞 𝐋𝐮𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐬 𝐀𝐦𝐛𝐫𝐞 𝐒𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐚𝐧 (𝟏𝟗𝟗𝟑, 𝐏𝐞𝐫𝐟𝐮𝐦𝐞𝐫 𝐂𝐡𝐫𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐩𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐒𝐡𝐞𝐥𝐝𝐫𝐚𝐤𝐞): Top notes of coriander, bay leaf, oregano, myrtle; middle notes of angelica root, resins, tree sap, patchouli; base notes of amber, benzoin, vanilla, sandalwood, styrax. Performance: 12+ hours on skin with robust initial projection that gradually transitions into a self-possessed and intimate skin scent. Gender inclusive. Apply three or more sprays taking care not to stain clothes.⁣

𝘈𝘭𝘪 𝘉𝘰𝘬𝘩𝘢𝘳𝘪 𝘪𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘍𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘳 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘌𝘥𝘪𝘵𝘰𝘳-𝘪𝘯-𝘊𝘩𝘪𝘦𝘧 𝘰𝘧 𝘈𝘭𝘪 𝘗𝘦𝘳𝘧𝘶𝘮𝘦𝘸𝘢𝘭𝘢.⁣⁣⁣