Sultan Pasha's Shisha Reveals a Perfumer Switching Mediums Mid-Career

Azman Perfumes has built its short existence on borrowed names. The Dubai house, founded by Husen Baba after a career in advertising and a formative meeting with Frederic Malle, has released work from Chris Maurice, Prin Lomros, and Antonio Gardoni. Its newest collaborator is Sultan Pasha, and the pairing matters less for who he is than for what he usually works in.

Pasha made his reputation in attars: oil-based, alcohol-free concentrates built on naturals, a format with roots in Islamic tradition's historical avoidance of ethanol. Critic Luca Turin, writing about Pasha's work on his Substack, described the attar tradition in terms that place it outside the assumptions of industrial Western perfumery. Pasha's other recent releases under his own label, Irisoir, Joyeux, Thebes, and Quintessentially Amber, were billed by Fragrantica as his first alcohol-based creations, made with co-perfumer Christian Carbonnel. Oh My Shisha! continues that same pivot, this time inside someone else's brand and someone else's format.

The shift is worth dwelling on because attar and extrait de parfum differ in more than packaging. Alcohol evaporates and carries top notes outward quickly, while an attar sits close to skin and unfolds slowly over hours, often changing character as body heat works on it. A perfumer moving from one medium to the other has to rebuild how the material is meant to release itself, since the two formats simply behave differently on skin.

Oh My Shisha! lands as a 50ml extrait de parfum at roughly 22 percent concentration, a strength that pushes it closer to an attar's density than most alcohol-based niche releases sit. The notes run from bergamot, tea, mint, apple, and tobacco smoke at the top, through a heart built on a shisha accord with cherry, almond, anisic spices, orris, and liquorice, down to a base of sandalwood, vetiver, musk, amber, honey, a milk accord, oud, tonka, spices, and cade. That base is dense enough to suggest the alcohol here is doing less evaporative work than usual, leaving something closer to an oil's slow bloom once the top notes clear.

Cafleurebon's review frames the fragrance as an attempt to capture the mood of an entire shisha evening rather than a literal transcription of hookah smoke, which is a useful claim to test against how the base actually sits on skin in heat. Warm skin should push the honey, milk accord, and cade further forward and let the top notes burn off faster than they would in a cooler room, which is exactly the kind of behavior an attar specialist would be attuned to shaping even inside an alcohol base.

The shisha accord itself is not new territory. Hermes' Ambre Narguile is widely credited with popularizing the honeyed tobacco-smoke profile that later shows up in Kilian's Smoking Hot and in Lattafa's 2024 release Mashrabya, both built on similar apple-tobacco-smoke frameworks at a fraction of Azman's price point. Pasha and Azman are entering an accord family that already has a mass-niche foothold, which puts weight on the base structure and the attar-trained hand behind it to justify the premium, rather than on the shisha idea itself, which by now is familiar territory.

What makes Oh My Shisha! worth tracking is less the shisha note than the perfumer's hand behind it: someone who spent his career formulating for oil and skin heat now working in a medium built for spray and evaporation, inside a 22 percent extrait dense enough to behave a little like the format he came from.