Abdurahman
A management consultant who came to fragrance by accident and stayed because it became a puzzle he could not put down. He does not wear scent to be noticed; he wears it to mark a day, and he can no longer put on a bottle without wanting to know how it was built and who built it.
For our twelfth conversation we boarded with Abdurahman Alatas, the eldest of three, a management consultant who works wherever a laptop will open: airport gates, hotel lobbies, rooms that were never meant to be offices. He lost his father at fifteen, early enough to leave a mark, and he has come to understand that he memorized him through his nose. Perfumery found him in 2023, quietly and then all at once. He reads a fragrance the way he reads a complex brief, taking it apart to see how it was built, and he keeps a private map of the places a scent can return him to. What follows is that map, read as a route.
Your relationship with fragrance
Honestly, it started by accident. A scent would show up, tied to a moment, a person, a room I never thought twice about, and somehow it would still be there long after everything else had gone. I did not plan for fragrance to become the way I remember things. It just did.
Then at some point it became something harder to explain. A puzzle I cannot put down. Every new scent makes me want to pull it apart: what is in here, how did someone decide this goes with that. And underneath the curiosity is something quieter, a respect for how much goes into making one good thing. I cannot just wear something anymore without wanting to know how it was built. I think that might just be who I am.
I did not plan for fragrance to become the way I remember things. It just did.
When the brief is finally sent and the laptop closes, he walks. The canal goes still, the lamps come on and the water holds them, and a day he would otherwise forget is quietly marked and kept. Of every place the work has taken him, this is the one he keeps returning to.
A scent that takes you somewhere
Two, and I cannot choose between them. The first is my father. Not a single note but a whole composition, the particular mix of hard work, his favorite cigarette, something soapy underneath. We would sit and talk about nothing and everything. I did not know then that I was memorizing him. I only know it now, every time something warm and smoky passes close and I am fifteen again, in that room, still with him.
The second is stranger, and just as dear. When I was falling for my wife, I would drive to the hospital at four in the morning to pick her up after her residency shifts. That smell, clean, cold, metallic, antiseptic, the smell most people want to leave behind. For me it became the smell of choosing to show up, of being somewhere before the sun came up, for someone worth being there for. I cannot walk into a hospital now without catching that cold air and feeling like nothing has changed.
What you are wearing now
Four or five days a week I am in a client office, so the question is not just what I love, it is what is considerate. I reach for things that are clean and precise, scents that have a point of view without filling the room with it. But catch me on a weekend, alone, out of reach, and it is a completely different story. Heavy florals, oud, animalic, the kind of things that take up space and make no apology for it. That is my guilty pleasure, and I have made my peace with the contradiction.
- Sartorial Youfuku · HoM Haute
- Penhaligon’s Sartorial
- Les Indemodables’ Rose de Jamal
- Escentric Molecules’ Cologne One
- Oud, worn like a mood
- Heavy florals that take up space
- The animalic, unhurried
- Whatever is out of reach of the office
A daily ritual
Coffee first, before the day has any demands on me. Then four spots on the back of my hand, four different fragrances to test and enjoy, before I even get in the shower. The day has not started and I am already paying attention to something.
And then there are the moments I cannot manufacture or predict: smelling my daughters after their shower. Warm skin, something completely their own. No bottle has ever come close to that. I have stopped expecting one to.
On good taste
It is personal. That is the whole definition, and also the most radical thing you can say about it. The moment taste becomes a consensus, it becomes something else: trend, conformity, approval-seeking. Real taste is the thing you arrive at after enough honest encounters with the world to know what actually moves you, as opposed to what you have been told should. It cannot be borrowed. It can only be built. And it will not look like anyone else’s, which is precisely how you know it is yours.
One belief he would defend
You can say you do not wear fragrance for compliments, and that is true. But a compliment from someone, unprompted, unperformed, is still the best feeling this hobby gives. Not because you needed the approval. Because it means the scent stopped being a fragrance and started being you. That is the whole point.
- 01Real taste cannot be borrowed. It can only be built, and it will not look like anyone else’s, which is precisely how you know it is yours.
- 02A compliment, unprompted and unperformed, is the best feeling this hobby gives, because it means the scent stopped being a fragrance and started being you.
- 03Behind every great scent is a human being who made a thousand decisions to arrive at that one thing, and that is worth honoring.
Fragrance does not need more bottles. It needs more intention.
There is nothing wrong with building a collection, but somewhere between the first purchase and the fiftieth, it is worth asking whether you are exploring or just accumulating. Slow down. Wear what you have. Let a bottle finish.
And please, stop chasing dupes. Every time you choose a copy over an original, you are quietly telling the person who spent years building that thing that their work was not worth honoring. Creativity in this industry is underfunded and deeply personal. It deserves more than a shortcut.
The best thing this hobby gave me was not a collection. It was a way of seeing, that behind every great scent is a human being who made a thousand decisions to arrive at that one thing. That is worth something.
Treat it like it is.