Room 1015 Purple Mantra Eau de Parfum

What it smells like

Purple Mantra is the calmest fragrance Room 1015 makes — an aromatic, resinous composition built around the Beatles' 1968 stay in Rishikesh and the Transcendental Meditation movement that followed.

Lavender, pink pepper and freesia open it. The lavender is the herbal, slightly camphorous kind rather than the soapy sort, pink pepper adds lift, and freesia gives the top a cool, watery floral quality.

The heart is clary sage, iris and soft floral notes — this is the stretch that gives the fragrance its character. Clary sage is herbaceous and faintly tobacco-like, and iris brings a cool, powdery, slightly carroty rootiness that keeps the whole thing dry.

The base is incense, myrrh, ambroxan and musk: resinous and smoky without being heavy, with the ambroxan providing a clean mineral warmth underneath. The community accords put amber at the top, then aromatic, smoky, balsamic and warm spicy.

Who made it

Composed by Serge de Oliveira, a French perfumer at Robertet who began at IFF in 2002 under Richard Ibanez and was appointed perfumer in 2013. He is known as an author perfumer with an unusually strong practice in natural materials, with work for Ormaie, 100Bon and Parfums de Rosine alongside his industry compositions.

You can see the other fragrances he composed for the house, and for others, on the Serge de Oliveira collection page.

Who it's for

For people who want an incense fragrance that is not a church. The lavender and clary sage keep it herbal and bright where most incense scents go dark and solemn.

It suits anyone who likes iris, aromatic lavenders or dry resins, and it is the most office-friendly fragrance in the line after Love-O-Matic. Within the house it is the quiet one — Cherry Punk and Hollyrose are loud by comparison, and this is deliberately meditative.

Unisex, and the easiest of the darker scents to wear in company.

When to wear it

Cooler weather suits the resins, though the aromatic top keeps it wearable most of the year. Autumn and winter are its best season.

It works across the day: restrained enough for an office, interesting enough for an evening. Projection is moderate and it sits fairly close after the first hour, which is part of why it reads as calm.

About the house

Room 1015 is a Parisian niche house founded in 2015 by Michael Partouche — Dr. Mike — a trained pharmacist who spent five years in London touring with his band before deciding that fragrance was the one discipline that could hold both halves of his life. The name is a hotel room number: 1015 of the Continental Hyatt House on Sunset Strip, the "Riot House", where touring bands took their after-parties in the 1970s.

The house calls what it does olfactory counterculture, and every fragrance starts from a specific cultural reference rather than from a material. The bottle is the same throughout — heavy coloured glass sized for the palm, under a faceted cap cut like a dark gem, black for the eaux de parfum and silver for the extraits. Purple Mantra takes its brief from the Beatles in Rishikesh in 1968. See the rest of the line in the Room 1015 collection at Redolia.