Roja Sweetie Aoud Parfum

Sweetie Aoud is what happens when a perfumer who spent nearly two decades at Guerlain decides that oud has become predictable. Roja Dove's own description, published by his house, calls it a highly original interpretation of a traditional oud-style fragrance, taking an ancient note and making it thoroughly contemporary and unexpected. The house frames the fragrance as a grand Arabian palace where the smell of freshly baked pastry hangs in the air - which is exactly what it is, and the joke lands better than it should.

The opening is bracing: bergamot and artemisia, herbal and bitter, buying a few minutes before the sweetness arrives. Then a patisserie accord comes up alongside Rose de Mai and cistus - buttery, caramelised, close to almond croissant - and it sits directly on top of the oud rather than beside it. The base is enormous and properly built: agarwood, cardamom, cumin, gurjum balsam, cypriol, patchouli, cedarwood, guaiac wood, juniper, amyris, frankincense and labdanum. Incense and resin push back against the sugar for hours, and that tension is the whole point. Without the frankincense it would be a dessert. With it, it is a serious oud that happens to smell delicious.

Dove set up in Mayfair in 2011, having been Guerlain's first non-family Global Ambassador and its Professeur de Parfums, and having opened his Haute Parfumerie in Harrods in 2004. Sweetie Aoud dates from 2015 and the house presents it as marking fifteen years of his work with oud.

This is cold-weather, night-time perfume. A Cape winter evening, a long dinner, a wedding where you will be photographed. It is unisex and worn widely by both, and it is one of the few gourmand ouds that men buy without hesitating over the sweetness.

Performance is at the top end of what parfum can do. Twelve hours plus, very heavy projection for the first three or four, and it will scent a room. One spray, applied to skin rather than clothing, is genuinely sufficient. Anyone who finds traditional oud medicinal or barnyard-like should try this before writing off the material.