In 2024 the Institute for Art and Olfaction gave the Aftel Award for Handmade Perfume to a jasmine soliflore from a Saudi house almost nobody outside the Gulf had heard of. The perfume was Arabian Jasmine. The house was Amer Perfumes. The perfumer was its founder, Amer Alradhi.

That is a specific prize and worth being precise about. It is not the Artisan category award, which went elsewhere that year. It is the discretionary prize named for Mandy Aftel, given to handmade work, and it is arguably the harder one to win because somebody has to single you out on purpose.

A year later Alradhi was back in the Art and Olfaction finalist list. Same nose, different masthead. The 2025 entry reads Patchouli, by Wamaq Perfumes, Independent category, perfumer Amer Al Radhi, creative directors Abdulaziz Yousef and Khalid Abdulrahman. So he made the finals two years running, first as a house founder and then as somebody else's hired nose.

“My inspiration comes from a desire to create scents that truly resonate with me.”

Alradhi is Saudi. Past that the published record is genuinely thin, so here is what is actually sourced and what is not. His European stockist tells the story this way: roughly eighteen years of collecting, researching and sourcing materials before he composed anything, then a concentrated run of formal study beginning in 2020. That is one account from one retailer and no school is named anywhere, so treat it as the house's version rather than a verified CV. What his own site does say, in Arabic, is that he is an independent perfumer who selects every material himself, and that the brief is to put Arab olfactory heritage and contemporary composition in the same bottle.

There is no interview with him anywhere. We looked in English and in Arabic. For a perfumer with consecutive Art and Olfaction recognition, that absence is its own story.

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Now the part people get wrong. Wamaq is not Amer Perfumes under a second name. It has its own storefront, its own creative directors, and its own roster of perfumers: Alradhi composed Patchouli, Seashell and Sambac, but Orris Oud is Ibrahim Fuhaid, a Saudi artisan perfumer with his own line stocked at Luckyscent. The two houses never mention each other anywhere. What we can tell you is that both storefronts publish the same Saudi tax registration number in their footers, which means they file under one registration. Draw your own conclusions; we are not going to invent a corporate structure for you.

The houses read differently in the bottle too. Amer Perfumes builds long, dense pyramids and runs an exclusive tier three to four times the price of its main line. Wamaq builds single material portraits: a flower, a root, a shell. One retailer describes the Wamaq brief as each fragrance being its own composition rather than a variation on a shared house accord, which the roster supports, since three different perfumers have signed five releases.

What unites them is sourcing. Both houses specify materials by origin rather than by name, which is unusual and tells you where the money went. Not agarwood but Ko Chang, Trat and Sri Lanka agarwood. Not sandalwood but Indian and Indonesian. Not rose but Taif, Bulgarian and Azerbaijani, stacked together in one heart.