AMBON

Kinana Verified independent store

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If you have ever wished there were such a thing as a pure jungle note distilled into oil — well, this is what you were looking for. From the dipstick alone, Ambon delivers the rain forest in a single inhalation. Wet leaves, green smoke, incense, the faint suggestion of flowers that have closed for the night. Forest, in its full complexity, somehow rendered without being broken into parts. Oils of this character were never common, and they have become genuinely difficult to source over the last decade. When they do appear, they tend to command prices that put them out of casual reach. We have priced this one as gently as we could. On the skin, a faint smoke begins to lift. It is not the smoke of fire — more the after-presence of something that burned hours earlier, the way a clearing still carries the memory of a fire long after the flame has gone out. This oil has aged for over thirteen years, and that ageing has done what only time can do. The various notes have settled into one another. There are no edges left. What you smell, if you give it the chance, is the entire vertical of a tropical forest. Canopy and creeper at the top, the broad green of the leaves, the sweet shock of fruit catching warm air. Below that, the working layer — bark, lichen, moss, the busy invisible life of the floor. And underneath everything, the rich black soil that has been making itself for centuries out of fallen wood. Ambon is an encapsulation of all of this in a single oil, anchored throughout by that unmistakable green incense signature so characteristic of the very finest Indonesian distillations from this region. A truly extraordinary offering, and one of the most generous in the entire Kinana collection. Indonesia, 2015 Available in a 2.5g bottle Show more