Swiss Arabian Secret Frankincense CPO Review (2023)

Frankincense is the most philosophically awkward material in perfumery. It is a resin, not a flower; a smoke, not a sweetness; the scent of temples, funerals and trade routes rather than of skin. To build a fragrance around it is to accept that the result will always carry a certain liturgical gravity — and to accept, too, that the material behaves in a way that frustrates conventional pyramid thinking, because olibanum is simultaneously a bright, terpenic top note and a dense, resinous base. Swiss Arabian's Secret Frankincense, released in 2023 as a 12ml concentrated perfume oil (CPO), tackles that problem head-on. Rather than hiding the frankincense inside a conventional accord structure, the house threads it through all three tiers of the pyramid — top, heart and base — so that the resin functions less as an ingredient than as a spine. Around it, the perfumers have built the two axes one expects from a modern Gulf composition: a warm, saffron-and-leather spice road on one side, and a powdery rose-violet-jasmine florality on the other, both settling onto an amber-oud-patchouli-musk foundation. What emerges is not a church incense pastiche, and it is not quite a western oud either. It is a Gulf mukhalat logic applied to a single, historically loaded material — presented in the most concentrated and least forgiving format the industry offers. At a Fragrantica community score of 4.57 out of 5, and at a price that hovers between twenty-five and forty US dollars for the 12ml bottle, it is also one of the more interesting value propositions in the current Middle Eastern market.