Erawan by Dusita: Thai elephants & European haystacks

I first encountered Parfums Dusita at Pitti Fragranze in 2018, the year Erawan was launched. After smelling the complete range, I remember having a long conversation about Oudh Infini (now discontinued) and its wild prowess (I still consider it a highlight when it comes to oud fragrances!). The perfume that really impressed me the most, however, was Erawan. While not as radical as Oudh Infini, its memory stayed with me all this time, never fading, surfacing in my mind every time I saw the bottle online. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, such persistence is a sure sign that I actually need to have it.

So now I am a happy owner and oversprayer of this ode to late summer. It’s amazing how Pissara Umavijani‘s story of a voyage through Thai wood on a back of a mighty elephant (Erawan, also known as Airavata, is a god-like white elephant that carries the Hindu deity Indra and can summon clouds) echoes my memories of Ukrainian fields, rinsed buckwheat, herbal summer tea and milky-sweet young green peas picked straight from the plot. Makes me marvel at how connected the world is, if one perfumer’s jungle adventure can be another person’s countryside in Eastern Europe.

And by the way, Dusita is one of the levels of paradise in the Thai Buddhist tradition. A place of joy and contentment. That’s why so many Thai spas and hotels both at home and abroad carry it as part of their name.

Erawan is an incredibly beautiful and original perfume, I know nothing else like it. The FIFI Breakthrough Fragrance of the Year Award it won 2018 in Moscow is so well deserved!

It’s a whole cornucopia of late summer greens. The notes of vetiver, hay, vanilla and gentle tea-like florals come together to create a sensation of grass and wild flowers piled to haystacks towering over the countryside in late August and early fall.

The hay is wet and warm, it gives off deliciously green and herby aromas of grass, grains, wild flowers and sun-warmed soil that it has absorbed the months before. If you focus on it, you can get a whiff of earthy chocolate too – that’s the work of Haitian vetiver mixing with the rest of the composition.

In addition to the dominant vetiver-colored hay, I can’t help but feel the scent of the buckwheat being rinsed under clear running water. It’s a very Eastern European sensation, I guess, because I don’t see that much appreciation for buckwheat here in Germany. In post-Soviet countries where I grew up, it is one of the food staples (it is super healthy, actually considered a somewhat exotic super-food in the West), and every child learns that the grains need to be rinsed several times in cold water before cooking. Technically, it is not a grain or cereal, although it looks like it. The edible part of buckwheat are seeds produces by the plant’s flowers. When rinsed, they radiate a faint scent of wild field flowers, warm cereal and dry mineral soil. The smell gets a unique umami component when cooked. In Erawan, however, it is part of the hay accord, recognizable, but not sticking out.

Another memory Erawan evokes are freshly picked young green peas, delicately sweet, creamy and the embodiment of green if it were not a color, but a taste. The floral accord hidden in the depth of the haystack is listed as lily-of-the-valley, but I guess that the molecule used here is also often used to recreate jasmine-scented tea – ever so light and gorgeous white petals on the bed of milky oolong.

As you see, this perfume is a splendid collection of green nature scents associated with late summer and countryside, at least for somebody with Eastern European roots. I wonder if people with Asian background experience it as a journey through the tropical forest that it was inspired by. Maybe I will have to make an elephant trip in Thailand one day to compare the experience!

The direct link it has to my heart might be a personal coincidence, but the masterful blending and incredible composition with green, herbal, and earthy-aromatic notes isn’t. If you are into unique fragrances that play on the theme of nature without mimicking it, I urge you to try it! Erawan is one of those rare perfume gems that have no analogies or alternatives. And while being unique, it is also a real fragrance – made to be worn on skin and not only admired as an artful abstraction.

The best place to go shopping for Dusita Parfums is their exquisite boutique in 11 rue de la Sourdière, Paris. For those who can’t go to the City of Light that often (the majority of Earth’s population, including myself, unfortunately), the official website is the second-best option. There, they also have a worldwide list of stores where you can try the fragrances before buying. Some trusted online shops that sell Dusita are luckyscent.com, indigoperfumery.com, elysee.eu.com, ausliebezumduft.de, essenza-nobile.de and lknu.com.au.

Have you tried anything from Dusita? What are your favorites from the house?

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