Altai

• Everyday
• Work

Altai opens with an aromatic freshness, quite brisk, that recalls pure mountain air. Then the fragrance gently warms up, with woodier, slightly spicy notes that add relief and density.

Over time, it becomes deeper, with a soft warmth that stays on the skin, like nature that is calm but powerful.

Noeme Paris is a French fine fragrance house founded in 2018 by Yassin Karim, who was born in Madagascar into a family of spice and flower exporters. His father was the island's largest vanilla exporter. He grew up surrounded by the scent of ylang-ylang, clove and drying vanilla in the family warehouses. That sensory heritage caught up with him in Paris, where he founded Noeme with the French-Moroccan perfumer Majda Bekkali. The house's name comes from the Greek noema, a philosophical concept for what lies hidden behind the subconscious, the unattainable, what no consciousness can ever fully grasp. Yassin Karim took it as the basis for one simple, absolute rule: every perfume is named after a place human beings cannot reach, and no creation from the house may resemble another on the market. Scorching deserts, Mexico's crystal caves, the depths of the ocean: places you cannot really live in, only imagine. The Iconiques collection opens these impossible voyages. The Chaman collection explores another unreachable territory, that of the ancestral rites and ceremonies of Mongolia, with its resins, woods and mystical spices. Each bottle is topped with a cap shaped like an ouroboros, the serpent biting its own tail, a symbol of infinity.