Statik Olfactive The Forbidden Temple 50ml

Tea and incense in a cool stone room. The Forbidden Temple leads with an apricot jasmine tea accord blended from green and black teas - by the house's own account it makes up around half the formula - and it smells like the real thing: tannic, faintly fruity, more bitter than sweet. Hinoki wood runs underneath with its clean, almost cypress-like sharpness, and then the resins arrive. Frankincense in several forms, some of it pyrogenated so it reads genuinely smoky rather than merely sweet, myrrh alongside it, and sandalwood and Armenian wood giving the base a dry creaminess. A smooth musk ties the spice and incense together. Statik Olfactive describes it as calming, meditative and transportive, which sounds like marketing until you wear it.

Materials: Apricot jasmine tea, hinoki wood, sandalwood, Armenian wood, bois d'encens, frankincense, myrrh, smooth musk. The house lists the composition this way rather than as a conventional top, heart and base pyramid, so we are presenting it as they do instead of rearranging it into one. Concentration is 20 percent eau de parfum.

Seven to nine hours with moderate, close projection. Tea is the fragile part in this climate - it is a delicate, volatile accord and Miami humidity strips it faster than almost anything else, so the apricot-tea phase that might run two hours in cool dry air can be down to forty minutes on a August morning. What replaces it is the incense and hinoki, which are entirely unbothered by heat and actually read rounder and less austere in damp air than they do in winter. Plan around that: this is a fragrance that becomes more resinous and less refreshing as a hot day goes on.

Cooler months, evenings, and quiet occasions. Fully unisex. It is not a crowd-pleaser and it is not trying to be, which is most of its appeal.

Small-batch indie work, sold here as the full 50ml bottle with no decant size. Smell it in person at the Miami Gardens shop and give it twenty minutes - the tea and the incense are almost two different fragrances.