The Story of Enfleurage

The Beginning

A brief background:

In 1989 I went to Yemen for the first time, with a friend; British passport. We were waiting for Sudanese visas in Cairo and British passports were a problem for Middle Eastern visas that year.

Our plan was to sail down the Nile, preferably on a raft. While we were waiting, we decided to spend a couple of weeks in Yemen. It seemed interesting and like a good way to spend 2 weeks.  It was north and south then.

While I definitely fell for the beans cooked in stone bowls, and the beautiful old city of Sana’a, and the long nights of qat chewing, accompanied by cold Canada Dry and a couple of thousand cigarettes, what I just swooned over was the Bakhour Hagmah in Sana’a. If you’re not familiar, it’s a mix of aromatics and spices, and you put a pinch in a little stone dish and then place that on coals. Once it starts to smoke, you grab the bowl sitting next to you, and turn it upside down over the smoke, capturing it. Once your bowl is full of smoke, you can flip it over and take the water vessel that you also have next to you, and pour the water through the smoke into the bowl, scenting it. Then you pour the water back into its vessel and you have something magnificent.

I mean really. It was all I needed. In Yemen they scent their drinking water with incense.

Of course they did.

The spark took.

In Tai’iz I wandered into a perfume shop and the indulgent store owner was kind enough to show me hair perfumes, and Yemeni Bakhours, cream perfumes, and oudh. I bought as much as I could and he gave me an empty aluminum bottle (with the label scrubbed off) of “dehn-al Oudh.”

I had no idea what it was, but I couldn’t take my nose out of it. (Just for the record, it was from a company called Mohammed Dowd and they were based at the export zone in Madras ((Chennai today))—I managed to get there as well, in 1997. But if you’re an oudh enthusiast, don’t do it.)

 I carried that bottle around with me for 5 years, until 1994, when I was inspired to start a small company so I could surround myself with scents like this. The inspiration came at the Plain of Jars, an Iron age burial site in central Laos, which was then full of uxo from the secret American war in the 1960s. The Plain of Jars exactly describes the site, and on 6 July 2019, the Plain of Jars was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. You can read its Wiki here.

 This was before the internet, I had been traveling throughout Indochina, as the countries were all just opening, and I was beginning to notice Agarwood, although I hadn’t noticed it came from Laos and Cambodia! Back I went to Yemen, alone this time, and just as the war was winding down. Traveling around was limited, due to the demobilization, but the people in Sana’a seemed pleased I was there as I guess it was evidence some normalcy was coming back. A tourist! I did make it to Tai’iz and, oudh bottle in hand, found Mr Ghailan once again. He was astonished, of course, but very kind and indulgent and showed me how to make a few things, and how to understand a few other things, and what flowers grew where, and when they bloomed, and about things like loofah seeds, ambergris and agarwood. I visited him in later years every time I went to Yemen, of course, but have now lost touch due to the fighting.

So you can say that Yemen was the seed and the spark and agarwood was the water.

I opened my store in New York City in 1995; it’s a story for another time, but suffice to say that over the years we became less about Yemeni Aromatics and more about essential oils, with a special focus on agarwood.