Sweden might not be a country you’d immediately associate with niche perfumes. But if you think about it a bit more,you realize that style and creativity seem to come natural to the Swedes. There are, in fact, quite a number of creative fragrance brands from Sweden in the market such as Byredo, Agonist, CRA-YON, Svensk Parfym, 19-69, Pana Dora, Mille Centum, and my recent discovery, SweDoft.
SweDoft was established in 2015 in Sweden. The brand’s vision is to create the finest niche perfumes. Founded by Perfumer Sfean J.A., the idea behind SweDoft is to create handmade fragrances with the best quality ingredients; a project that started as customised/ personalised fragrances for private clients and eventually became a perfume brand. With his 23 years of experience in Oud, aromatic notes, and customising perfumes, the perfumer at SweDoft gets his inspiration from stories and personalities to design and create fragrances. They currently have 20 fragrances in their line and RASPUTIN is their most popular and best selling fragrance.
RASPUTIN is a wonderful concoction of strong and finest spices blended to perfection. It opens with the bright fresh notes of Bergamot, Jasmine and pineapple that quickly turns into this beautiful fusion of cardamom, cinnamon, cloves and patchouli mid which is sensual and addictive. Then the notes slowly settle down to this amazing smooth woody musky dry down of Cedar wood, Vanilla, Oud, Tonka, Musk and Incense. The bottle contains one of the best Indian Ouds that is available and an old oriental blend of cedar with vanilla to add that mysterious feeling.
Even with this unique and huge number of ingredients, SweDoft was still not satisfied with the traditional blending results. So they decided to do something unusual and at the same time simulate the last part of the RASPUTIN story. They dropped the container with the perfume blend to the bottom of the Øresund Strait, which forms the Danish-Swedish border. The huge compression on the perfume container and the shaking caused by the waves at the bottom of the glacial dark sea for 90 days gave them unique results that they did not expect. The ingredients had flawlessly combined to fuse the formula.
The Russians drowned the legendary Grigori Rasputin in 1916. Now, Swedoft have extracted the perfume and the legend of RASPUTIN from Öresund.
A solid masculine fragrance that performs well and lasts all day, with a decent sillage and projection, SweDoft’s RASPUTIN is a winner all the way!
Brooky Fragrances, aka Suhail Basheer, is a perfume aficionado and reviewer based in Muscat. He can be found on Instagram as @brookyfragrances.