A Memoir, Bottled

Our Story

A luxury Emirati fragrance house translating My Story, the memoir of H.H. Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, into Extrait de Parfum, one chapter at a time.

Born from
The Beginning

Born from a book

Qissati means my story. The name is borrowed from the memoir of H.H. Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, a book of vision, setbacks, horses, and poetry, written by the man who imagined modern Dubai. Few things carry nostalgia the way scent does, except perhaps the pages of a beloved book. We brought the two together. Each fragrance even holds a touch of aged paper in its depths, the quiet, musty warmth of a book that has been read and loved.

Composed by
The Craft

Composed by masters

Each chapter was entrusted to master perfumers Olivier Cresp, Anne Louise Gautier, and Nathalie Templer, the noses behind some of the most celebrated fragrances of our time. The brief was never simply to make something beautiful. It was to make a memory wearable, in the richest concentration perfumery allows: Extrait de Parfum. The result is a tribute to the reader, the writer, and the leader, rendered in scent.

Your skin,
The Promise

Your skin, your story

These are fragrances for aesthetes who are striving to become what they are. A Qissati chapter does not announce itself and disappear. Give it time to settle on your skin, and it becomes personal, shaped entirely by the one who wears it. Five chapters exist today. Like the city that inspired them, the story is still being written.

Olivier Cresp

Master Perfumer

Anne Louise Gautier

Master Perfumer

Nathalie Templer

Master Perfumer

The Perfumers

Each chapter is composed by an internationally recognised nose, the hands behind some of the world's most celebrated fragrances.

Olivier Cresp

Olivier Cresp

Firmenich

Born in Grasse in 1955 into a family that has worked in perfumery since the 17th century, Olivier Cresp grew up among the flower fields his great-grandfather cultivated. He trained in New York before returning to France, joining Firmenich in 1992 and being named Master Perfumer in 2006. That same first year at Firmenich he composed Angel for Thierry Mugler, a fragrance credited with creating the gourmand family and reshaping modern perfumery. In 2012 he was made Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture, and in 2018 received the Fragrance Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. His work favours clarity over complexity, telling a story with few, precisely chosen notes.
Anne-Louise Gautier

Anne-Louise Gautier

Expressions Parfumées

Anne-Louise Gautier trained at ISIPCA, the French institute that has produced much of the industry's senior talent, and composes from Expressions Parfumées in Grasse. Her range moves easily between chypre, leather and gourmand registers, and her signature is a controlled richness: depth achieved through structure rather than volume. She has composed for Ormonde Jayne, Sospiro, Sylvaine Delacourte, Carven, L'Occitane and Annayake. In 2024 her creation Zenith Echos, developed with Élodie Bernard, was named Signature Scent of Beautyworld Middle East. She works to a stated principle of conviction, open-mindedness and a taste for aestheticism.
Nathalie Templer

Nathalie Templer

Expressions Parfumées

Nathalie Templer came to perfumery through chemistry. After scientific studies in France she spent three years with a small house in Grasse, seeing the industry from production through quality control to research. She then spent a decade at Mane as a Perfumer Analyst, becoming a GC/MS expert who analysed and smelled every natural and synthetic raw material in the profession's vocabulary, followed by two years based in Dubai. In 2016 she joined Expressions Parfumées as a perfumer, where she specialises in fine fragrance for the Middle East. Her approach favours reduced formulas in which every ingredient carries a precise role, and she describes representing the craft of Grasse abroad as a privilege.
Jacob Varela

Jacob Varela

Takasago

Born in Barcelona in 1986 and raised in Luxembourg, Jacob Varela wanted as a child to be an inventor so that he could take things apart and understand them. He studied chemistry, completed an internship in a chromatography and organic chemistry laboratory in Nice, then enrolled at ISIPCA to do the same with molecules. He graduated in 2012 and joined Takasago, spending eighteen months developing his craft alongside Francis Kurkdjian at the creation centre on rue Torricelli, followed by three years in the Shanghai office. He speaks four European languages and Mandarin, and draws on that cultural range in his work with raw materials.
Guillaume Idlas

Guillaume Idlas

Guillaume Idlas studied at the Université de Montpellier and works as a perfumer with a strong grounding in fragrance science, including headspace analysis, odour detection thresholds and sensory perception modelling. His compositions span fine fragrance for European houses, and his approach reflects a conviction that perfume design depends as much on how a material is perceived as on its concentration in a formula.
The Inspiration
“Give it time to settle on your skin, and it will tell your personal story.”
Qissati · My Story

Explore the five chapters of the collection.

Discover the Chapters