Top Notes 
Rose
Oriental spices
Heart Notes 
Persian saffron
Woody notes
Base Notes 
Indian oud
Sandalwood
05/22/2025
ClaireV
731 Reviews
ClaireV
1
Good all-rounder oudy mukhallat
If you are looking for an excellent rose-oud mukhallat for a price that won’t hurt your wallet too much, then look no further than Al Faransi’s Baghdad. On my skin, the note pyramid is slightly inverted, with the sour, leathery Hindi oud striking my nose first, even though it is a heavy basenote. The oud smells authentic, but not so animalic as to cause concern for more timid noses. It is a battered, worn leather case set upon gently smoking woods – exotic and alluring, but not particularly challenging. The rose, which emerges right on the heels of the oud, feels complex and ‘worked out’. Heavily peppered and saffron-ed at first, it fleshes itself out into a huge, purplish explosion of jamminess, spice, and smoke, underscored with an emphatic flourish of fruit rot. The rosy sturm und drang splutters out in a bath of sandalwood for a finish not a hundred miles away from the cream soda-ish last moments of Amouage’s Rose TRO.
Sounds amazing, right? It is. But – and this is a big but (and I cannot lie) – Baghdad exhausts all its resources within the space of a few hours, plunging from an amphitheater-sized presence in the first hour to a mere whisper of smoke and roses by the third. This shouldn’t necessarily bother people looking for a quality rose-oud option on the cheap, as its reasonable price means that one can simply reapply throughout the day. But it is a factor to consider. If pressed, I would say that Baghdad is my very favorite from the brand, with Hind running a close second. Baghdad leans masculine, but the classic smoky rose and oud pairing is so universal that I cannot imagine women not wanting to wear this one too.
Sounds amazing, right? It is. But – and this is a big but (and I cannot lie) – Baghdad exhausts all its resources within the space of a few hours, plunging from an amphitheater-sized presence in the first hour to a mere whisper of smoke and roses by the third. This shouldn’t necessarily bother people looking for a quality rose-oud option on the cheap, as its reasonable price means that one can simply reapply throughout the day. But it is a factor to consider. If pressed, I would say that Baghdad is my very favorite from the brand, with Hind running a close second. Baghdad leans masculine, but the classic smoky rose and oud pairing is so universal that I cannot imagine women not wanting to wear this one too.
