Bortnikoff
Oud Monarch
The Story
Oud Monarch is the Extrait de Parfum from Bortnikoff, the house Dmitry Bortnikoff founded in Thailand in 2018 after co-founding the agarwood distiller Feel-Oud. Its base names two separate agarwood oils, Oud Merauke and Oud co Chang, and sets cacao against them rather than pushing smoke forward.
Oud
What a tree makes when it is wounded
A dense, resinous wood that smells warm and slightly medicinal, with a leathery, animal-tinged smokiness and a sweet, almost barnyard funk underneath. It feels ancient and brooding, wrapping the skin in something thick and quietly powerful.
Woody
Dry grain of cut timber
The smell of cedar shavings, sandalwood, and dry vetiver roots, a sanded, resinous warmth with a faint pencil-box rasp. It feels grounded and composed, the quiet backbone that makes a scent read as serious and lasting.
Floral
A whole garden, never one flower
Not one flower but the impression of many, usually rose, jasmine and orange blossom leaning on each other until no single one is recognizable. Sweet, dewy, faintly powdery, with nectar underneath. It is what people mean when a perfume smells like flowers and they cannot say which.
Gourmand
edible sweetness good enough to bite
A dessert-like warmth drawn from natural materials such as vanilla, tonka, benzoin, and honey or cocoa absolutes, the smells of sugar cooked rather than sugar itself. It feels cozy and comforting, wrapping the wearer in something soft, sweet, and almost edible.
Warm Spicy
Glowing embers of the spice drawer
The rounded heat of cinnamon, clove, and nutmeg, dry and slightly resinous, like a baking pantry rather than a sharp kitchen. It creates a flushed, enveloping warmth that feels intimate and cool-weather, hugging the skin from within.
Animalic
Skin, fur and something not quite tame
A raw, body-warm muskiness that reads of skin, hair and fur, sometimes sweet and powdery, sometimes sharp and faintly feral. At its best you cannot tell where the perfume stops and the wearer starts. At its strongest, it is the reason some people back away.
Magnolia
Lemon-cream petals breathing over a southern garden
What it is
An ancient flower. Magnolias were already blooming in the age of the dinosaurs, and their petals are tough enough to survive the beetles that pollinate them. The absolute comes from fresh petals.
How it smells
Lemon peel and cream, pitched between citrus and tea rose. It opens fizzy, softens into milky petal, green stem and a small clove warmth, then dries clean and faintly fruity. Lighter on its feet than jasmine.
In perfumery
Perfumers reach for it in the heart when a white flower needs to stay light: dewy and luminous, without the indolic weight of tuberose or gardenia. It sits easily with citrus, peony, lily and soft musks.
Good to know
The absolute is rare and costly to extract, so the magnolia in most mainstream bottles is built from aroma-chemicals, a portrait rather than a photograph. Natural perfumers draw it from the flower itself, as an absolute or a distilled flower oil.
Frangipani
Tropical petals breathing coconut and almond cream
What it is
Five waxy petals on a small tropical tree, plumeria, grown across the Pacific, the Caribbean and India. Solvent or CO2 lifts the scent from picked blooms into an absolute few perfumers ever get to use.
How it smells
Coconut and almond cream, ripe peach behind it, and a green spicy edge that stops it turning syrupy. Milkier and sunnier than jasmine or tuberose, and nowhere near as indolic. It smells like heat on skin.
In perfumery
In the heart it does the work of sunlight, turning a composition creamy. Coconut, ylang, jasmine, sandalwood and vanilla sit alongside it, and when a fragrance smells of hot skin on a beach, this is usually why.
Good to know
Yields are tiny, so true frangipani absolute is scarce and costly: mainstream frangipani is usually a reconstruction, while natural houses use the absolute or CO2 extract itself, sparingly. The name comes from a Renaissance Roman family whose famous glove perfume it is said to recall.
Rose de Mai
The honeyed May rose of Grasse
What it is
The hundred-petalled rose of Provence, picked by hand for a few weeks each May around Grasse. Fresh blossoms go into solvent, which draws out a waxy concrete; the concrete is washed with alcohol to give the absolute.
How it smells
Rounder and softer than Damascena rose, honeyed and jammy, with green leaf and a lychee-and-pear fruitiness running through. It dries to warm honey-wax sweetness dusted with pollen, without the sharp metallic bite.
In perfumery
Used in the heart for radiance rather than volume, it makes a floral seem lit from within. Perfumers set it against jasmine, violet and oakmoss, and the Grasse harvest supplies many of the French couture houses.
Good to know
Roughly 600 kilograms of freshly picked blossoms yield one kilogram of absolute. Between that ratio, the few weeks of May and the small Grasse acreage, genuine Rose de Mai stays one of the costliest naturals in perfumery.
Himalayan Rose
Mountain-grown otto, dewy where other roses turn jammy
What it is
Same damask species as Bulgaria's, grown where the nights are cold and the air is thin. Slow ripening on Himalayan terraces in Nepal and northern India yields a steam-distilled otto, pale gold in the vial, not an absolute.
How it smells
A rose just cut, not one steeped in jam. The damask heart is there, honeyed and faintly spicy, but crisp green stem and a lemony brightness lift it. Airy, high-pitched, almost watery in its freshness.
In perfumery
Perfumers reach for it when rose must read living rather than preserved: dew on an oud, lift in a chypre. Roughly three to four tonnes of whole blossoms go into a single kilo of oil, so it is dosed by the drop.
Good to know
Set beside the classic ottos it is the lightest and greenest, clarity where they have honeyed depth. Naturals like this fade sooner on skin than a synthetic rose accord, and hold a complexity no single molecule imitates.
Cinnamon
Sweet bark heat, glowing rather than stinging
What it is
The prized part is the inner bark. Strips are peeled from the tree and curled into quills for the spice trade; the oil is steam-distilled from the trimmings and broken bark. Sri Lanka's true cinnamon is the delicate one; the coarser, lower-priced cassia is what fills most kitchen jars.
How it smells
Warm, dry and sweet, with a red glow from cinnamaldehyde and a clove-like edge behind it. True cinnamon smells rounder and faintly floral; cassia bites. The dry-down goes woody and balsamic, with a whisper of leather.
In perfumery
A heart note, and the reason gourmands and orientals feel like a warm room. It works with vanilla, amber, rose, apple and tobacco, and the whole trick is restraint: a touch gives glow, a fraction more gives sting.
Good to know
The Dutch once burned their own stockpiles to keep the price up, back when this bark outvalued gold and Ceylon was worth conquering for it. Modern caution is duller: cinnamaldehyde sensitizes skin, so the dose is capped.
Tobacco
Dried leaf curing into honey and hay
What it is
Nothing is burning. The leaf is cured and fermented first, then solvent-extracted into a dark, sticky absolute, and what comes out smells of hay and honey rather than of an ashtray.
How it smells
Warm, dry, sweet: cured hay and pipe tobacco with honey, dried fruit and a trace of cocoa behind it. A green, leathery bite at the start softens into something ambery and balsamic, sometimes with a powdery floral edge.
In perfumery
It sits from the heart down, where vanilla, tonka, honey and leather all cling to it. Give it vanilla and you get the sweet, edible kind; give it leather and spice and you get the dark, dry kind.
Good to know
A living tobacco plant smells sharp and green. Everything sweet in the absolute is made during curing and fermentation. Authentic absolute is costly and restricted in some markets, so many tobacco notes are rebuilt from coumarin and hay.
Oud Merauke
Papua's deep earth, cocoa and wet forest
What it is
Oud from Merauke in the far south-east of Indonesian Papua, distilled chiefly from Aquilaria filaria, with Gyrinops wood turning up alongside it. Papua was only opened to agarwood in the last few decades, and its dense, lignin-heavy wood demands long soaks and hard distillation before it gives up any oil at all.
How it smells
Balsamic and dark, opening with citrus and a sour plum edge over the wet-jungle petrichor the region is named for in oud circles. Beneath sits rich cocoa-like oleoresin and a deep earthy base. Oils from Aquilaria filaria run especially dark and heavy, while the Gyrinops wood of the same forests turns cooler, greener and more piney.
In perfumery
A base note in the fullest sense, prized by artisanal houses for the sheer floor it puts under a composition. Its cocoa and wet-earth character sits naturally with patchouli, vetiver, dark resin and rose, and it supplies depth where a lighter archipelago oil would simply evaporate.
Good to know
Merauke is one origin within Papua, not a synonym for it, and the two genera growing there smell quite different, so ask which tree an oil came from. Papuan distillation is young and still small in scale, and good resinous wood is uneven, which keeps genuine Merauke oil scarce.
Oud co Chang
Caramel and cocoa oud with dry fruit and soft leather
What it is
Oud sold as Oud co Chang, a name that echoes Ko Chang, the large island off Trat province in the Gulf of Thailand, near the Cambodian border. Bortnikoff credits this oil to Feel-Oud, the agarwood and sandalwood distiller Dmitry Bortnikoff co-founded in 2013.
How it smells
Distinctly sweet, with caramel and a cocoa nuance running under dry fruit and soft leather. The wood beneath is warm and resinous, and it grows rootier and earthier the longer it is worn.
In perfumery
In Oud Monarch it shares the base with Oud Merauke from Papua, framed by cacao, vanilla and labdanum. Its own cocoa tone meets the cacao halfway, which helps keep the pair of ouds smooth and dark rather than smoky or medicinal.
Good to know
Bortnikoff lists this oil as plain Oud co Chang, while Oud Maximus uses an Oud Purple co Chang; the house credits both to Feel-Oud. Here the oud is framed by magnolia, frangipani, rose and cinnamon, which soften its natural intensity.
Cacao
Roasted cocoa, bitter until the sugar arrives
What it is
Chocolate starts as a bean in a pod, packed in white pulp, on a shade-loving American tree now farmed mostly in West Africa. Ferment it, dry it, roast it, and the absolute smells of chocolate with nothing added.
How it smells
Dry, roasted and dusty, like cocoa powder or dark chocolate shaved thin. Bitter up front, with coffee, nut and damp earth behind it, drying to a powdery brown warmth that stays close to the skin for hours.
In perfumery
Heart to base, the note that makes a gourmand edible without making it sugary. It sits with vanilla, tonka, patchouli, orange and chili. Sweeten it and it drifts toward drinking chocolate; leave it bare and it stays bitter.
Good to know
The Maya and the Aztec drank it bitter, frothed and spiced, and held it sacred. Sugar arrived with Europe, centuries later. The material itself never took it up.
Civet
Animal warmth that makes flowers bloom indecent
What it is
A paste scraped from a pouch under the tail of the African civet, a nocturnal cat-like animal, then tinctured in alcohol. Nearly all perfumery civet today is civetone, made in a lab.
How it smells
Undiluted it is shocking: fecal, indolic, more soiled stable than perfume. At a trace it turns honeyed and leathery, warm as skin, with a low tobacco hum. The shift from repellent to alluring happens entirely through dilution.
In perfumery
Perfumers use it in traces, as base and fixative, to make jasmine and rose smell like they are growing on a living body rather than sitting in a bottle. Animalic chypres and orientals run on it.
Good to know
Animals are still caged and scraped for it in Ethiopia, on a small scale, decades after the lab made that unnecessary. And this is not the palm civet behind kopi luwak coffee: same family, different animal.
Castoreum
Smoky beaver hide with an aspirin edge
What it is
Territory marking, essentially. The secretion from a beaver's castor sacs, dried by trappers and worked into a tincture or absolute, though what you smell in almost any bottle today is the synthetic version.
How it smells
Dark, tarry leather with a medicinal edge, like birch smoke off a wet coat. Underneath there is sweetness: dried fruit, hay, a smear of vanilla. Dilute it far enough and the growl turns to warm suede.
In perfumery
It anchors the base and holds everything above it: the hide of a leather scent, the smoke of a Russian-leather style, the long tail of an old oriental. It keeps company with birch tar, labdanum, oakmoss and tobacco.
Good to know
Beavers live on willow and poplar bark, thick with salicin, the compound behind aspirin, and it carries through: a cool, almost medicinal thread under all that leather. It has long been a flavouring material as well.
Labdanum
Sticky amber resin scraped from sun-baked rockrose
What it is
A Mediterranean rockrose sweats gum through its leaves in summer, dark and sticky enough to glue your fingers together. Harvesters boil or scrape the branches to get it off, then extract that crude gum into absolute and resinoid.
How it smells
Balsamic warmth, then leather, dried fruit, honey and a curl of smoke. There is something almost ambergris-like in the opening. Hours later it has settled into brown tobacco and worn skin, still going.
In perfumery
Take labdanum out and most amber accords collapse; it is what vanilla and benzoin get built on. It fixes a formula in place, gives chypres and leathers their depth, and sits well with rose, oakmoss and incense.
Good to know
Before there was distillation, there were goats. Herds browsed through cistus scrub all summer, the gum matted into their beards and thighs, and shepherds combed it out. Labdanum is one of the oldest aromatic materials still in use.
Vanilla
Cured orchid pods, custard and faint smoke
What it is
Green pods come off the orchid vine smelling of almost nothing. The scent is made, not found: months of blanching, sweating in the sun and slow drying before the vanillin appears. Mexico first, Madagascar now.
How it smells
Custard and caramel up front, then something darker underneath: dried fruit and a thread of tobacco smoke. It turns powdery as it dries and sits close to the skin. Real cured vanilla reads deeper than vanillin alone.
In perfumery
Perfumers use it to round off edges. Anything too sharp, too green, too austere gets warmth and body from a vanilla base, which is why it anchors many oriental and gourmand builds alongside tonka, amber, sandalwood and spice.
Good to know
Every flower opens for one day. Miss it and there is no pod, so all of it is pollinated by hand, a trick devised by Edmond Albius, a twelve-year-old enslaved boy on Réunion. Most vanilla flavour today is synthetic.
Fragrance Character
The opening is creamy and tropical, frangipani and magnolia with the oud held close beneath. Rose de Mai, Himalayan rose, cinnamon and tobacco warm the middle. The cacao in the base reads dusty and dark, closer to bitter chocolate than to sugar, and it keeps the two ouds smooth rather than medicinal. Civet and castoreum bring a warm animalic edge to the drydown.
Longevity
how long it stays on skin
The hourglass reads wear time: how many hours the fragrance keeps speaking before it fades. A bar that barely leaves the start means a few fleeting hours. One that runs the full length carries from morning into evening. Treat it as typical, not promised. Oily skin holds scent far longer than dry.
Sillage
the size of its scent trail
Sillage is French for a ship's wake, and that is exactly what this measures: how much of the scent reaches the room instead of staying on you. Low is a whisper only close friends catch. Enormous fills the room, then keeps filling it after you leave.
Experimental
Built to provoke, not to please
Some perfumes are made to be liked. These are made to be argued about: inky tar, hot rubber, fruit on the turn, metal and fur where you expected flowers. The coin glows for a scent that provokes and dims for one that plays it safe, which is sometimes the point.
Office
Polished, and never louder than the room
Scent is manners in a shared room. At this range it should reach the person across the desk and stop there: tidy citrus, soft musk, pale woods, all of it reading competent and considerate. A glowing coin means nobody has to mention it. A dim one means it travels.
Evening
After dark, when it deepens
Dinner, drinks, the night that runs long. Low light is where ambers, resins and smoky woods stop being polite, and where a plush floral finally blooms. A glowing coin means it is waiting for exactly this hour. A dim one means it did its best work in daylight.
Romantic
Close enough to be felt
A fragrance can hum against skin instead of announcing itself across a table. That is the register here: creamy florals, vanilla, soft musk, a thread of spice, warm enough to make someone lean in. The coin glows when a scent sets that mood and dims when it is more practical than seductive.
Formal
Quiet authority in a dressed-up room
A wedding, a ceremony, a room where everyone has thought about their shoes. What works here is structure, not volume: smooth woods, disciplined florals, soft leather. A glowing coin means it holds its posture all evening. A dim one means it is too casual for the room.
Casual
Easy comfort for unhurried days
Errands, coffee, a slow Saturday with nowhere to be. Nothing here has to impress anyone, so the fit is soft and easy: fresh citrus, light woods, a little warmth off the skin. A glowing coin says yes to all that. A dim one means the fragrance is asking for a bigger night.
Day to Night
where its mood naturally falls
A bar running from sun to moon, reading the hour the fragrance was made for. The more of it that stays gold, the more the scent belongs to daylight and open air. The further the blue reaches back toward the sun, the deeper and warmer it turns: evening, candlelight, low rooms.
Winter
Warmth that carries through cold air
Cold air mutes a fragrance and slows it down, which is why winter belongs to the dense and the warm: resin, smoke, vanilla, leather, ambered spice. The bar reads how well this one pushes back, glowing against the chill instead of thinning out in it.
Spring
Fresh blooms in mild, rising warmth
Mild, humid air lifts a light composition, so the season belongs to dewy florals, green stems, soft powder and citrus you can see through. Alive rather than heavy. The further the green runs along the bar, the more comfortably this one wears in that weather.
Summer
Bright and airy in real heat
Heat does the projecting for you, which is why the wrong perfume turns unbearable by noon. What survives is cool and breathable: sharp citrus, salt air, aromatic herbs, water. Things that refresh instead of cloy. A short bar here means save it for cooler months.
Fall
Spiced warmth for cooling days
As the air cools, the rich materials stop smothering and start reading clearly: dry woods, warm spice, tobacco, amber, fruit gone golden. It is the season perfume turns contemplative. The bar fills according to how naturally this one settles into crisp, cooling days.
Best Worn
Autumn and winter, from late afternoon onward. It suits dinners, evenings out and cold weather generally, reads unisex, and works for anyone usually put off by drier, smokier oud.
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The Vibe
The Nose
Dmitry Bortnikoff
Founder and perfumer
An architect by profession who turned to distilling. He co-founded Feel Oud in 2013, distilling agarwood and sandalwood oils, then launched Bortnikoff in Thailand in 2018. Its perfumes run 95 to 100 per cent natural. He composed Bortnikoff Oud Maximus, and Bortnikoff Sayat Nova and Bortnikoff Santa Sangre with Rajesh Balkrishnan.
More by this noseOud MaximusMusk KhabibMusk Cologne
The Maison
Real oud, true ambergris. Small batch extraits made of living materials.
Dmitry Bortnikoff builds the slow, artisanal way, from naturals most makers simply cannot get their hands on. Real Indian oud, honeyed roses distilled straight into sandalwood, and many oils distilled in house with nineteenth century techniques. The result feels alive on skin, warm and a little unruly.
- Origin
- Thailand
- Founded
- 2018
- Known for
- Real animalics, tiny batches
EVERY DECANT
From the original bottle to your door
We buy the original flacon at full retail price, direct from the house.
A medical grade Socorex syringe takes the exact millilitres straight from the flacon.
Packed into the hot foiled box and handed to DHL, every duty already paid. How a decant is made
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