Nishane Ani Extrait de Parfum

Mert Güzel and Murat Katran started Nishane in Istanbul in 2012, and the house has been making a claim about its own geography ever since: on its site it presents itself as the city's first niche perfumery to be celebrated internationally. Ani is the fragrance that best explains why any of that matters. It takes its name from the ruined medieval city of Ani on the Turkish-Armenian border, now a UNESCO World Heritage site, and Nishane says it was created under the inspiration of a famous Anatolian folk song and dedicated to ruining any border between people. Very few niche houses build a fragrance on a political idea and get away with it.

Nishane files it as spicy, woody and vanilla, and publishes a full pyramid. The top is bergamot, green notes, blue ginger and pink pepper. The heart is blackcurrant, Turkish rose and cardamom. The base runs patchouli, cedarwood, vanilla, benzoin, ambergris, musk and sandalwood. Blue ginger, better known as galangal, is the unusual choice, sharper and more medicinal than common ginger, and it gives the opening a green bite the pink pepper amplifies. Then the rose arrives, and it is unmistakably Turkish rose: jammy, deep, faintly wine-like, cut with blackcurrant so that it reads fruity rather than soapy. The long base is where the extrait concentration shows itself, a soft resinous slightly animalic bed that carries the rose for hours.

Cécile Zarokian is the perfumer commonly attributed with the composition. No name appears on the house's own listing.

It is unisex and genuinely so, the rose too dark to read as feminine and the wood too soft to read as masculine. Evening and cold weather flatter it most, and a Cape winter suits it far better than midsummer, when the resins can turn heavy.

Extrait de parfum concentration means what it says. Ten hours is the floor rather than the ceiling, projection stays strong through the first three or four, and it survives on a shirt collar through days of neglect. This is not a fragrance to apply generously and it is not a fragrance for a small shared office. Sample before buying, because the rose-and-galangal opening is polarising and the price of an extrait makes a blind purchase an expensive mistake.