Jo's Scent Notes: Maya Njie Aethi Opum
Some fragrances seem to haunt your dreams. That’s how it has felt since I first smelled Maya Njie Aethi Opum, the intriguing and irresistible creation from a truly fascinating perfumer. (NB In case you’re wondering, the fragrance takes its name from the African fan palm.)
Now, I get sent many, many fragrances and of course I smell them all. But from first spritz, I kept coming back to this. Aethi Opum has a grounding quality that is particularly welcome in these seemingly untethered times. There’s no mention of ‘sun-baked red earth’, but that’s somehow what I get, smelling this. That, and drifts of smoke, curls of incense. It is very… elemental.
The back-story: Swedish-born Maya Njie’s original roots are in Gambia. Highly visual – she has a truly great eye – Maya partly takes inspiration from faded family photo albums, which somehow convey an amazing sense of heat and colour, the perfect starting point for highly creative perfume compositions.
In Aethi Opum, there actually are two types of incense, both frankincense and something called thiouraye (churai) incense. Alongside aidan fruit, which is native to West Africa, there is a brightening sprinkling of black pepper. And coffee, too – a ‘note du jour’ in perfumery, anything but gimmicky here; so photorealistic, it makes me long for my coffee-drinking past.
The whole thing starts to feel buffed, smoothed, and as it wears, softens and deepens on skin, Aethi Opum becomes vanilla-y – in a dry rather than an over-sweet way.
I have had endless compliments since I started wearing this. Too many to count, actually. But the biggest, perhaps, was from the two lovely women in my local fish shop, who brave the elements year-round behind an ice-packed counter that’s almost open to the winds off the beach. ‘Ooooooh, YOU smell lovely,’ they chorused, after I’d spritzed this generously, before heading down to buy our dinner.
So, I have a new benchmark, now, when it comes to fragrance appreciation. If you can smell it, like it and comment from six feet away, across a wet fish counter piled with prawns and cod and kippers, that says everything.
I’m not sure even the French have a word for that. If they’d smelled it trailing behind me, that would be a sillage, but this actually announced my presence. Would it be a room rocker? Fish shop rocker? Whatever, Polly and Gail loved it
As do I.
And as, I hope, will you.
£105 for 50ml eau de parfum – buy here
