# Amouage — Luban Al Akhdar

> Luban Al Akhdar, "green frankincense" in Arabic, is Amouage's 2025 attar release, composed by Quentin Bisch under chief creative officer Renaud Salmon. It is a 100 percent oil concentration, a 12ml da

## Essence
Luban Al Akhdar, "green frankincense" in Arabic, is Amouage's 2025 attar release, composed by Quentin Bisch under chief creative officer Renaud Salmon. It is a 100 percent oil concentration, a 12ml dabber-applied perfume that treats Omani frankincense not as church incense but as a citrusy, aldehydic, green-resinous flower. It is the literal antithesis of smoky cathedral incense: crystalline, soapy-clean, sun-flooded, reaching for the resin's bright lemon-pine facet rather than its dark balsamic one. Within Amouage's Attars Collection, relaunched in 2021, it is the most modern and least traditional entry.
## Scent Profile
A note on format first: this is an attar, pure perfume oil with no alcohol, applied by dabber, so projection behaves differently from a sprayed EDP and the opening is compressed.
In the first ten to twenty minutes after dabbing, the aldehyde-and-citrus accord blasts upward in a way wearers consistently call soapy, fizzy, and zingy, luxurious in the sense of high-end hotel hand soap rather than dish detergent. More than one comparison reaches for the citrus-aldehyde top of MFK 724. These are not the powdery aldehydes of Chanel No. 5; they are effervescent and distinctly modern. The frankincense is already present from minute one, but it reads unusually lemony and piney rather than smoky.
Through the heart, roughly one to three hours though attar phases blur, the green resinous core takes the lead. Green-tear Omani frankincense has a documented citrus-pine-mineral facet, and Bisch leaned into it rather than the traditional smoky-balsamic side. Myrrh registers behind it as a faint earthy warmth, a textural counterweight more than a spice. Among the listed notes, frankincense is the architecture, citrus and aldehydes blend brightly on top, myrrh anchors quietly, and labdanum shows up mostly in the deep drydown.
From hour three onward, the labdanum-myrrh base reveals itself as a soft balsamic warmth, a clean, musky, resinous skin scent that some wearers report still smelling twelve to nineteen hours later. A few detect a modern synthetic warmth in the late drydown reminiscent of Amouage Purpose, another Bisch frankincense. The arc is luminous citrus-incense, then green-resinous heart, then soft balsamic-clean drydown, and it is fairly linear once the opening fades. The signature accord is aldehydic-citrus-green-frankincense over a barely-there resinous foundation, Bisch's frankincense reimagined as a blooming flower. One popular wearer summary nailed it: soapy clean, citrusy, green frankincense, simple and complex at the same time.
## Performance
Performance is unusually strong by oil-perfume standards. On skin, expect twelve to nineteen hours from a single drop, with longevity skewed toward the resinous base. Projection is moderate to strong for the first two to three hours, about an arm's-length cloud, before settling into a softer but persistent skin scent. Sillage is good early and intimate late, and on clothing, where dabbed oil does adhere, it can persist for days, a consequence of having no alcohol carrier to speed evaporation.
Weather matters: the aldehyde-citrus top behaves better in cool, dry air, while heat and humidity can amplify the soapy facet and flatten the frankincense. The base, by contrast, projects beautifully in cold dry air and is a strong fall and winter performer. As for application, dab a drop on each wrist and a touch behind the ear and do not rub the wrists together, since that bruises the top notes; a second drop in beard or hair extends projection noticeably. Because 12ml of oil holds the active equivalent of a much larger spray bottle, one drop is plenty.
## Wearing Context
This is best in fall, winter, and cool spring, and not ideal in summer heat. It has both a daytime-clean and an evening-sophisticated register, since the soapy-citrus opening reads casual-elegant while the resinous drydown reads contemplative-formal. It suits business-formal meetings, ceremonial or religious contexts, dinners, and gallery openings, and it shines whenever you want incense without the medieval-cathedral connotation, more a clean meditation room or hammam than a church. It falls flat in high-energy nightlife, summer outdoors, and any setting calling for sweet or gourmand profiles. Socially it reads as clean, expensive, religiously coded yet cosmopolitan, and genuinely gender-neutral, neither feminine-creamy nor masculine-aggressive. It is also well-suited to layering with other Amouage attars and EDPs, which the brand explicitly encourages.
## Comparisons & DNA
Amouage Purpose, also by Bisch, is the closest cousin from the same house: both center frankincense and use his aldehydic-fresh-modern treatment, and many describe Luban Al Akhdar as Purpose with the luban tripled, brighter and more refined. Amouage Incense Rori is smokier, more leathery, and more chypre-leaning, where this is cleaner and brighter. Comme des Garcons Avignon is the church-incense reference, and Luban Al Akhdar is its secular, modern, transparent opposite. Heeley Cardinal is a closer point of comparison for the clean-resin angle but is drier and more austere, while Diptyque Eau Duelle shares the warm-spice-vanilla-incense register but is sweeter. Andy Tauer L'Air du Desert Marocain is louder, drier, and more cumin-and-petrichor, where this is smaller-scaled and cleaner, like the indoor air of a high-end mosque. MFK 724 comes up repeatedly for the citrus-aldehyde top, though it lacks the frankincense core, and Armani Prive Bois d'Encens is close in luminous green-pine-incense mood but more woody-dry. As of mid-2026 no budget dupe has targeted it, since the attar format and very recent release insulate it. In lineage it descends from Amouage's earlier frankincense-forward work, but Bisch's reading is the most modern and the most explicitly conceptual.
## Reception
Sentiment skews positive but polarizes sharply on price. Common praise centers on its uniqueness, with many saying nothing else smells like it, plus its elegance, the crystalline citrus-aldehyde-frankincense alchemy, the excellent longevity, and the upgraded attar bottle, widely held to be a major presentation improvement. Common criticism is the price per milliliter, an order of magnitude above the brand's EDPs, the soapy top note that puts some wearers off, and the sense among long-time devotees that the brand's recent Bisch-led work has moved away from the dense, demanding signature of the Chong era. Dedicated critical coverage is sparse, as this is a recent release in a format that rarely gets full reviews; Salmon has been quoted saying he wanted frankincense handled in a totally novel way, as though it were being experienced for the first time by someone who had never encountered it. The most common verdict among enthusiasts is that it is uniquely beautiful but expensive, so sample before buying.
## Versions & Reformulation
A single composition in attar concentration only, 100 percent oil, in a 12ml dabber bottle, with no EDP version. The 2025 release coincided with a redesign of the Attars Collection bottle that is widely considered a major upgrade. Maturation is documented at four weeks of ageing plus four weeks of maturation per Amouage's notes, and there are no known reformulations as of mid-2026.
## Acquisition Notes
This sits in the ultra-luxury attar tier at 540 USD for 12ml, the official price, in a single size. The decant ecosystem is thinner than for the EDPs because attars are harder to split and the dab format makes spraying awkward, though a few vetted decanters carry small splits. Because it is so new and niche, counterfeiting is essentially a non-issue at this point. With 100 percent oil, a single bottle should last most wearers one to three years of regular use.
## Notable Facts & Lore
- Salmon's brief to Bisch was conceptual rather than literal: treat frankincense as if it were being smelled for the first time, and use complementary materials like citrus and aldehydes to construct the notion of frankincense rather than its physical smoke.
- Bisch has described treating the resin as a blooming flower, using its citrusy and aldehydic facets to lift it into translucent territory rather than weighing it down with myrrh and labdanum, which appear only in supporting roles.
- That fits Salmon's broader direction for the post-Chong house: more accessible, more concept-driven, more modern, with critics divided on whether it is a smart evolution or a dilution of the house signature.
- The Attars Collection itself was relaunched in 2021 as a deliberate revival of the ancient alcohol-free Middle Eastern tradition, and Salmon has spoken about how difficult attars are to compose, since with no alcohol carrier every ingredient must integrate directly into oil and hold its own without dilution, a brief he calls among the most difficult and most rewarding.
- Luban Al Akhdar is the most conceptual entry in the collection to date, and as a mid-2025 release wearer response is still cataloguing it.