Kajal Dahab Absolu, the extrait that puts four flowers into Dahab

The new Gold Collection extrait signed by Patrick Müller of LUZI adds jasmine, rose, geranium and lily of the valley to a composition born without flowers, over bergamot, passion fruit and oakmoss

Dahab is Arabic for gold. It is also the name Kajal Perfumes Paris gave the bestseller of its Gold Collection, a composition built on an absence: the original carried no floral notes at all. Dahab Absolu reverses that. The extrait keeps the name and installs a heart of jasmine, rose, geranium and lily of the valley, joining Dahab, Lamar, Aican, Lamar Caviar and Lamar Noir. It was presented in world preview at the Mandarin Oriental in Milan in May 2026, signed by the Swiss perfumer Patrick Müller of LUZI, the Zurich fragrance house founded in 1917. In perfumery, absolu names a material — the alcohol-washed extract of a concrete, itself obtained by solvent extraction of plant matter. On this bottle the word works as a title. Read the note list as a list of materials and the arithmetic turns: of the fruits at the top, most have never been extracted from a fruit, and the flower that closes the heart has never been extracted at all.

Bergamot from Reggio Calabria and the thiol in grapefruit

Three materials at the opening come off a press. Bergamot, grapefruit and orange are cold-pressed from the rind. Bergamot comes from Citrus bergamia, grown almost entirely along the Calabrian coast around Reggio Calabria, a fruit whose commercial value sits in the peel while the juice goes nowhere. The oil carries linalyl acetate and linalool in quantity, which give it the floral, tea-like register that separates it from lemon or lime. It also carries bergapten, a furocoumarin that turns phototoxic on skin in sunlight, which is why fine fragrance works with furocoumarin-free grades. Sweet orange oil is mostly limonene and comes off the juice industry as a by-product, one of the few citrus materials available in volume at low cost. Grapefruit owes its bitterness to nootkatone, a sesquiterpene ketone, and to 1-p-menthene-8-thiol, a sulfur molecule with one of the lowest detection thresholds ever recorded: it registers at concentrations where most materials register as nothing.

Passion fruit, mango and green apple built molecule by molecule

Passion fruit, mango, green apple and the generic tropical fruits have no commercial extract. They are accords, assembled one molecule at a time. Green apple is built from esters such as hexyl acetate, kept crisp with green alcohols so that it lands in the orchard instead of the candy shop. Mango leans on terpenes, carene and terpinolene among them, rounded off with lactones that supply the flesh. Passion fruit is the problem of the group. Its character depends on sulfanyl compounds, thiols and oxathianes of the family that also shapes Sauvignon Blanc and guava, which read tropical at trace doses and turn sweaty, then feline, a little above them. The whole work is in the dosage.

Blackcurrant leaves, the thiol that carries fruit into the flowers

Blackcurrant leaves sit in the heart instead of the top, and the chemistry explains the placement. The blackcurrant materials used in perfumery — above all bud absolute, produced from Ribes nigrum in Burgundy, where the buds are harvested before the leaves open — owe their signature to a thiol of the same family that shapes passion fruit and grapefruit. That green, faintly animalic edge is what makes blackcurrant read as blackcurrant instead of generic red fruit, and it is the thread that ties the tropical opening to the flowers behind it. The fruit stops being fruit when the heart begins. One of its facets carries forward and turns green.

Jasminum grandiflorum, indole and the Hedione extension

Jasmine and rose arrive as naturals with established supply chains, and each poses a different question of method. Jasminum grandiflorum is grown in Egypt and India and picked before dawn, while the flower still holds its scent. Solvent extraction produces a concrete, washed into an absolute; several hundred kilograms of flowers go into a single kilogram of finished material. The profile rests on benzyl acetate for the fruity top, indole for the animalic shadow that gives jasmine its carnal register, and methyl jasmonate for radiance. Perfumers extend that radiance with Hedione, the synthetic methyl dihydrojasmonate introduced by Firmenich in the early 1960s, which spread through modern perfumery after Eau Sauvage.

Rose distilled or extracted, and the damascenone that smells of dried fruit

Rose forces a choice between two processes with two outcomes. Steam distillation loses much of the phenylethyl alcohol, which is water-soluble and stays behind in the distillation water. Solvent extraction keeps it, and the absolute reads fuller, deeper, more honeyed than the oil. Rose also contains damascenone, identified in rose oil in the 1970s, carotenoid-derived and present at fractions of a percent, which pushes the flower towards cooked and dried fruit. In a composition already saturated with fruit, that facet works with the structure.

Geranium from Réunion, a leaf oil doing the work of a flower

Geranium is a leaf oil, distilled from Pelargonium graveolens in Egypt, China and Réunion, where the Bourbon type takes its name. Citronellol and geraniol give it a rose profile with a minty, green edge, which is why perfumers use it to stretch rose and to put a cutting edge on a floral heart that would otherwise sit soft.

Lily of the valley after Lyral and Lilial, muguet rebuilt twice

Lily of the valley yields nothing. No extraction method recovers a usable material from the living plant, so muguet has always been an accord, and that accord has been rebuilt twice inside a decade. Lyral, the industry name for HICC, was prohibited in the European Union under Regulation 2017/1410, with non-compliant products barred from the market in August 2019 and withdrawn by August 2021. Lilial, or butylphenyl methylpropional, was banned from cosmetics in March 2022 after its classification as a reproductive toxicant. Contemporary muguet is built from hydroxycitronellal, restricted and still permitted, alongside Florol and Mayol, which read cleaner and more transparent than the accords based on the two banned molecules. Honey links the flowers to the base, rendered through beeswax absolute or through phenylacetate esters and phenylacetic acid, which smell of honeycomb at low doses and of something far more animal above them.

Oakmoss, atranol and the chypre structure under Dahab Absolu

The Italian note list carries an ambiguity worth untangling. Muschio translates both musk and moss, and the base names both. As materials they share nothing. Musk in contemporary perfumery is synthetic. Natural deer musk left the palette decades ago, and the families in use split into macrocyclics, closer in structure to the natural molecule and generally biodegradable, and polycyclics, cheaper and more tenacious. Oakmoss is a lichen, Evernia prunastri, harvested largely in south-central and south-eastern Europe and processed in Grasse, and it is the backbone of the chypre. The same Regulation 2017/1410 that removed Lyral also banned atranol and chloroatranol, two of its allergenic constituents, leaving only low-atranol grades in use, often supported by Evernyl, the synthetic that reproduces the dry, inky, slightly leathery facet of the lichen. Treemoss, Pseudevernia furfuracea, which grows on conifers and has often served as a companion material, falls under the same pressure. That oakmoss puts Dahab Absolu closer to a fruity chypre than its gourmand notes suggest. A chypre is defined by structure, not by smell: citrus at the top, a mossy and woody base, a heart mediating between them. Here the fruit occupies the heart.

Guaiac wood under CITES and Cashmeran, the wood that is not a wood

Caramel in perfumery is built from the molecules that appear when sugar browns — maltol and ethyl maltol for cotton candy, furaneol for jam and strawberry, cyclotene for maple. Vanilla may be natural extract from Vanilla planifolia, vanillin produced by synthesis or by fermentation, or a combination. Together they make a sweet register that the oakmoss exists to dry out. Guaiac wood is a genuine distillate, obtained from Bulnesia sarmientoi, a slow-growing tree of the Gran Chaco in Paraguay and Argentina. The oil is semi-solid at room temperature, rich in guaiol and bulnesol, and smells smoky with a rosy edge that makes it a bridge between woods and florals. The species has been listed in CITES Appendix II since 2010, which regulates its international trade. Cashmere wood is no tree. It is an accord built around Cashmeran, a molecule developed by IFF in the 1970s that reads musky, powdery, spicy and woody at once and holds on skin for hours. The velvety trail comes out of a synthetic. In an extrait, where the concentrate load runs highest, the slow materials — guaiac, oakmoss, musks, Cashmeran — take up more and more of what reaches the nose as the volatile top evaporates. A fruit-led opening either survives that handover or dissolves into it.

Kajal Perfumes Paris, from kohl to 75 countries

Kajal Perfumes Paris was founded in Paris in 2012 and works between Middle Eastern perfumery tradition and French technique. The name comes from kohl, the mineral pigment used to line and protect the eyes. The house is distributed in more than 75 countries, with offices in Paris, Toronto, Dubai, London, Milan and Manila, and its bottles carry an eight-pointed star stopper drawn from decorative geometry.