The name does most of the work. Halwa, halva, baklava — these are the words that come to mind when you first sniff this oil, and there is no point pretending otherwise. But to understand what kind of sweetness we mean, you have to step away from the modern shortcut version. Forget the corn-syrup baklava sold in airport boxes. Think of the real thing — the way it has been made across the Levant and Turkey for centuries, with raw honey and butter and patience. Then think of the halva of the Indian subcontinent, made from flour and ghee and sugar and cooked down until the whole pan smells of caramel and toasted milk. Layer those two things in your mind, dip the result in attar, and you begin to approach Halwa. That this aroma can come out of a tree is, frankly, hard to believe. We have distilled Pursat oils for years, and we have never produced one in this register. It is not what Pursat is supposed to do. On the skin, Halwa retains every gram of its powdery, deeply gourmand sweetness — sugar, molasses, honey, fresh pastry — but a butteriness rises to round it out, the kind of richness that turns a sweet thing into a meal. It is, by any honest measure, indulgent. It is also remarkably balanced, never tipping over the edge into cloying. Give it a few hours and the composition calms. The powerful opening softens into a more resinous heart, the sweetness pulls back, and what remains is a beautiful sweet-wood note with the unmistakable ouddy backbone of fine Pursat material. The price reflects the quality of the wood, the rarity of this particular profile, and the years it has spent in glass. Halwa is, for our money, one of the most distinctive oils in the entire Kinana range — and one of very few oils, anywhere, that earns the right to be named after a sweet. Pursat, Cambodia. 2019 Available in a 2.5g bottle only
