Bastet

Among the most expensive raw materials in all of perfumery. Iris rhizomes are lifted from the earth, then aged three to five years before distillation, because the scent forms in storage as the root dries. After all that waiting the yield is famously small. What survives is a cool, suede-soft, violet-tinged powder that money can barely buy.

True sandalwood, the species the temples of India have burned for three thousand years. The oil forms only in the heartwood and only with age, so young wood smells thin and old wood smells holy. Ours is a select extract at seventy percent santalol, drawn from Indonesian logs estimated at half a century of growth. Buttery, creamy, and long. It is the throne this scent is built on.

Nymphaea caerulea, the sacred water flower of the Nile, opening to the sun at dawn and sinking beneath the water at dusk. Prized by Egypt's priesthood for its dreaming, euphoric breath. Its true absolute is rare and slow to give up its scent, which is fitting for a flower that spends half its life under the water.

One of perfumery's legendary animalics, and the reason the old orientals smell alive. Feral at full strength, it turns luminous in dilution, lending warmth, radiance, and a narcotic, skin-close creaminess that behaves like fur rather than flower. Here it is the feline soul of the goddess.

Captured from roasted beans, a dark and unusual extraction that is far rarer on the perfumer's bench than the drink suggests. It lends a smouldering, ritual bitterness beneath the florals, a pulse of the morning rites kept in Bastet's honour.

Distilled from the alligator juniper, a tree of the American Southwest named for bark that cracks into square plates like the hide of the animal. Earthy, resinous and raw. Chosen as an offering to Sobek, the crocodile god of the river, it grounds the composition in Nile mud and old, untamed forest.