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Oud has made its entry into a celebrated Paris collection, thanks to a little-known work by Christiane Gautrot, the co-founder of diptyque, alongside Desmond Knox-Leet and Yves Coueslant.
Christiane, an architect by training, spent many years studying the Moroccan craft of zellige, the ceramic mosaics that decorate fountains, private and public spaces and the walls and sometimes floors of houses, from the humblest to the most sumptuous.
She has designed many herself combining traditional and contemporary motifs, including some that can be seen today at the Hassan II mosque in Casablanca.
In the contrast between its geometric order and the chaos of the world, zellige encourages meditation, soothes torment and offers universal harmony. Stars, curls, polygons, circles – cobalt, manganese, antimony, oxides – tin, lead, clay and copper works in which form, rhythm and chemistry find their true compatibility, say admirers.
The composition of perfume is governed by very similar principles, and for diptyque the correlation was striking. This approach to Arab heritage by a European artist has thus given birth to Oud Palao.
Selected by the perfumer Fabrice Pellegrin, its creator, the raw materials are all sourced from environmentally-friendly producers. “The same applies to the oud, whose source tree, Aquilaria, is threatened with extinction, due to wild logging; sourced from Laotian plantations where the trunks are harvested by hand, the oud we use comes from a supply chain that respects the environment and the producers. It takes an average of six years before the resin can be used,” Pellegrin said.
It’s available at Al Hawaj outlets at City Centre Bahrain, Moda Mall and Seef Mall’s diptyque boutique priced BD52.500 for a 75ml bottle.
