Swiss Arabian – Sawalef – Ramsa Dukhoon
I received this sample from my friend Povilas. He has an extensive collection of Bakhoors and generously put together a sample set for me. Many thanks for that! 😀
Dukhoon seems to be a category of bakhoor made from relatively finely ground material, which can be pressed into balls, tabs, or blocks but is sometimes also sold loose.
In this case, they appear to be hand-made lens shapes, about 3cm in diameter. This particular one weighed 7.8g.
In the international Swiss Arabian shop, 150g costs $146.81 (around €136), though only the prestigious packaging is shown.
Povilas bought it from a site called SAVE24 and paid just under €70.
Price per gram: approx. €0.45 to €0.90
The product description by Swiss Arabian uses many words to promise a luxurious fragrance experience; warm, sensual, and floral. The only actual scent notes mentioned are musk and jasmine.
I’ve used Ramsa Dukhoon on my incense warmer in the bathroom on and off over the past few months. I broke the lump apart to only use tiny bits of it. I had hoped to be able to snap it into small pieces, but much of it simply crumbled into powder, with a few larger and smaller chunks mixed in.
The scent is extremely potent; just a few crumbs are enough to fill a room.
I think I decided to use Ramsa in the bathroom because I find the scent soapy and perfumed, which I can handle best in that setting.
Especially the first, dense waft of scent after placing it on the warmer smells very soapy to me, and this aspect dominates the overall character of the fragrance immensely.
After a while, the soapiness fades, allowing a floral aspect to emerge more clearly, though without anything particularly identifiable. I find the scent fresh in a way, yet at the same time, its heaviness contradicts that.
Toward the end, the fragrance becomes slightly warmer and sweeter, and a bit of the woody base comes through.
The after-smell is a lighter version of the scent, showing a bit more freshness.
Even after using Ramsa about a dozen times, I still couldn’t quite pinpoint what I was smelling. So I looked up a product description, but even after knowing what I was “supposed to smell”, my impression didn’t really change.
I can’t detect any jasmine in it, nor musk. Whenever I try to find the musk aspect, I keep getting stuck on the soapiness, making the fragrance feel heavy and old-fashioned to me.
Povilas told me that Ramsa Dukhoon is one of the Sawalef bakhoors he likes the least, and our impressions match quite closely. He just seems to find the soapiness a bit less overwhelming than I do.
From such an expensive bakhoor, I would have expected more. In any case, it’s definitely not my taste.
I haven’t burnt Ramsa in a while, so I took this post as an opportunity to revisit it and used some of it. The musk in this one reminds me of what I think are type of musk more commonly used in womens perfumes in the past, I can’t place what type it is though. I only get some greener jasmine aspects while smelling unheated tablets, when heated the whole floral aspect is as you say heavy and compressed into a scent that is just sweet and old-timey florals, I can’t untangle it either. Overall I don’t hate it, but it’s too floral-sweet for my taste and definitely not worth the full price.
By the way I did get it in the same package as shown on the Swiss Arabian page, I think you can find most of these Sawalef bakhoors for about half-the price on some sites, so it’s likely the retail prices have heavy markups, until nobody buys them and they get discounted.