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LUNE STORY
A La Lune Nectar: Essence of "Golden Silk Wood"
A La Lune Nectar is the basis for all A La Lune fragrances.
A La Lune is proud to use only the superior quality extracts of Phoebe Zhennan to produce A La Lune nectar. Phoebe Zhennan as known as “Golden Silk Wood”, rarer than Oud and once used to build the pillars of the Forbidden City, is one of the most expensive raw materials in the world due to its scarcity and its delightful unique woody aroma used in the past by the Oriental Nobility.
As an enhancer, A La Lune Nectar boosts the overall staying power of the top, heart, and base notes while adding an extra element of complexity to the scent — a dark resinous wood of East Asian origin containing vibrant amber molecules that bring warmth and vitality to the skin. When the fragrance has fully settled, what remains is the unique scent of A La Lune Nectar- a revisit of sophistication, mystery, and profundity.
The term Zhennan is from the tree species terminology, it’s a particularly rare and valuable wood. In the past, Zhennan was so precious that only royal families could afford their use. Our Zhennan perfumes are blends of the highest concentration of infused oils and the best ingredients chosen.
A La Lune Exclusive:
Gifts from Ancient Civilization
Most of the delicate substances used in A La Lune have been employed in the field of aroma for thousands of years. Sabina przewalskii, for example, was used historically in Tibetan rituals. The Epic of King Gesar dated from the 12th century recorded that this legendary lord once prayed to five Tibetan deities by lighting mugwort and Sabina przewalskii cypress in order to win the war. The name of this ritual is Weisang, a literal word made of a Chinese character and a phonetic translation of a Tibetan character, where “Wei” is a Chinese term meaning to light anything on fire while “sang” is a Tibetan verb meaning to purify the spirit by cleansing. Over millennia, Tibetans have been lighting fires using cypress Sabina przewalskii or pine branches. To remove violence from sanguinary killings, those people consequently sprinkled water on young men as they passed through the smoke.
The origin of the natural oils used in A La Lune perfumes has a significant contribution to the quality of the perfume. There are nations, regions, and cities with long-standing reputations for producing fine quality perfume oils, as each of them has soil, climate, and other unique conditions that are ideal for the cultivation of certain plants grown there.
A La Lune’s Sabina przewalskii natural oil is extracted exclusively from the Qilian region to ensure the originality of the ingredients. At A La Lune, thousands of devotees on the Tibetan plateau carefully harvest, dry, collect, and preserve the leaves of Sabina as raw material for oil extraction, following a tradition that has been passed down for thousands of years.
A La Lune Aspiration:
Leader of Micro-renaissance
Not only fragrance, but a piece of history.
A La Lune’s history with agarwood began with an exploration of the miraculous ancient legends of incense making. One of our founders, Kamaria, which means moon in Swahili, did a research project during her postgraduate studies, “The History of Incense Making in Asia”, and she discovered the fascinating leitmotif, the ingredient that leads A La Lune with pride today, “Agarwood”.
Agarwood was far more prevalent in ancient China than it is today, and it commonly appears in some of China’s quintessential literature, poetry and paintings, where they are a type of the confectionery. People from families of wealth or nobility would invariably keep incense burners in their homes, even close to their beds. They would also incense their garments and carry incense pouches before leaving home. In traditional Chinese culture, there is no distinct difference between incense, perfume, herbs and spices.
The Chinese believe that “every fragrance is a medicine” and that there is surely some intrinsic bond between what people wear and how they feel about their bodies. Furthermore, as recounted in the ancient Indian epic Mahabharata, the rarity of incense determines its value and the delicacy of its aroma attests to its esteemed status, hence its use only for special occasions or religious ceremonies. According to the Hebrew Bible and Islamic hadiths, once agarwood was introduced to the Middle East via the Silk Road, the ancient Arabs named it “the wood of the gods” and it was often used in religious rituals and meditation. Its calming effect was thought to enhance the connection between humans and God. A La Lune’s objective is to aspire a micro-renaissance of traditional art and craftsmanship in the field of fine perfumery, as it were, the Renaissance. Together, may our fragrance creations bring a part of the transcendental fecundity and grandeur of history with their historical dimension and new aesthetic values.