Al Rehab’s ‘Aroosah’ is a medicinal blast of camphoric camomile delight.

​

‘Aroosah’ is Arabic for bride, so being beautiful, elegant and timeless in white, is perfectly fitting for this opinion-splitting fragrance. Be aware that there is no grey area with ‘Aroosah’ – it’s either love or hate. Al-Rehab themselves even describe it as “an unusual fragrance” and I happen to love it.

 

It opens as herbaceous, astringent and sharp, with a biting camomile that calms after the piercing opening. It’s a brave start, which I enjoy, as it powers forward with a no-nonsense potent intent. Once you’ve lifted the veil on your “unusual” bride, the powdery-white and sharp green vibrancy mellows into a warm, almost almondy, sweet heart. It gently loses its zesty tartness from the indolic white florals (in the similar way to Dior’s ‘Poison’), to transcend into a zen state of aromatic cleanliness. Camomile is certainly the star of the show, performing as sweet, heady, calming and lingering. This fragrance manages to be both invigorating but also therapeutically calming - I can’t get enough.

​

‘Aroosah’ has one of the best longevities from Al Rehab, lasting for around 6 hours and with a silage of about an arm’s length. I have the 6ml oil roller-ball version (there is a spray) and I wear it on days that I feel clean and want to embrace my superior cleanliness, or when I’m not feeling as fresh as I’d like, so use it to mimic a serene state of clean.

​

I was recently working with a cast of performers/dancers where close physical proximity/intimacy was standard practise. ‘Aroosah’ was my choice of fragrance during these weeks of intensive rehearsals. To my highly attuned nose, understandably my cast members smelt like salty skin, fresh sweat, (sometimes stale clothes and grizzly beard.) But after a sweaty rehearsal, they hugged me and proclaimed that I’d had a shower - I hadn’t, I was just wearing ‘Aroosah’. A basic standard of hygiene seems to escape some people. Feeling shower-fresh doesn’t have to be fleeting (or a yearly event), I’d recommend keeping a £2 bottle of ‘Aroosah’ in your gym bag – it should be mandatory and handed out for free on public transport.

​

‘Aroosah’ reminds me of the sparklingly-clean smelling laundry powders found in Europe, where they keep their sheets whiter than white, and are not opposed to a thorough hand-wash in traditional stone basins. This is the immaculate scent of your laundry after a widowed but hardy orthodox grandmother has scrubbed them into cleanliness submission for your sins. This is the type of industrial soap smell that’s hypothetically used by the same aforementioned elder-woman to “wash your filthy mouth out” when you’re naughty. If cleanliness is next to Godliness, then ‘Aroosah’ is the holiest of all fragrances.

​

NOTES – Woody Notes, Musk, Floral Notes, Camomile, Herbal Notes