Copper vs. steel, hydro vs. steam, Cambodi vs. Papuan……… when it comes to aromatics, contrast is your best teacher. And just like techie details enrich your experience of oud, a swipe of Ruh Gulab on one spot and Turkish Rose on another will let you smell what a hundred articles can’t teach you.
Both are Rosa Damascena. Yet—they smell nothing alike. Ruh Gulab is a half-transparent golden hue compared to the deep red of its Turkish cousin. Indian Gulab is less thick and smells way more ethereal. It takes 600-700 kilograms to distill one kilo of Bulgarian rose absolute……… while you need around 4,000 kilograms to produce a single kilo of Ruh Gulab.
But aside from what this Gulab can teach you about what a few distillation tweaks can do to Rosa Damascena, it also lets you smell rose petals in their most pristine form; the ruh, the essence of the flower. The scent is beautifully transparent—yet full-bodied—in the same way a classic Mysore smells pure white while at the same time letting you feast on the creamiest santalum ever.
Quality Ruh Gulab is one of the most expensive roses money can buy. Because you literally need three, four, or more tonnes of petals—how many football fields full?—yield is limited and in high demand. It’s also the cleanest, most pristine portrait of a rose petal you can smell.
A scent that’s more diffusive than a rose itself, a microscopic still image of rose magnified inside your nose, makes this Ruh Gulab also the prettiest rose of our Rose Fest line-up. A stunning, airy, otto white see-through-smelling rose oil with every inch the olfactory vigor that lets a single drop project its fragrance with force as it leaves a wake of sillage that will cause anybody who passes through it to stop, pause, and share in a moment of immaculate beauty.