Dmitry Bortnikoff

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Training and career

Reference databases spell the name two ways, Dmitry Bortnikoff and Dmitry Bortnikov. Same man: a Russian working out of Southeast Asia. Past that, the biography is thin, and deliberately so. No birth date, no home town, no schooling is published. The house does not communicate on any of it, and nothing reliable fills the gap. The single training credential the official site offers is a degree in architecture, given with no institution and no year attached. No perfumery school appears in any source.

The turning point happened upstream, among raw materials rather than in a compounding lab. In 2013, his official About us page states, he co-founded Feel-Oud, a company distilling agarwood and sandalwood oils. The site names no partner. The specialist press does: it is Russian Adam, who would go on to found Areej Le Doré. As late as 2022, the Kafkaesque blog still referred to Bortnikoff as Russian Adam's former partner at Feel Oud. The two men come out of the same still house, which accounts for the family resemblance between the two brands.

Bortnikoff the perfume house dates from 2018, in Thailand, per the official site; some secondary sources say 2017. The opening catalog reads as a direct continuation of the distilling years: Mysterious Oud and Oud Maximus both appear that year, and the oud range has anchored the house ever since, flanked by a main collection working vetiver, musk and chypre, plus colognes and attars.

Approach and method

The method starts before the formula. Bortnikoff distills a substantial share of the oils that go into his perfumes, and the house says it pairs nineteenth-century distillation practice with newer process work. Being distiller and perfumer at once changes the job: he does not pick a material off a supplier's palette, he makes it, with all the variables that implies, wood grade, cook time, water temperature, vessel type.

The declared naturals content, 95 to 100 percent depending on the composition, is not decorative. It dictates how the perfumes are written. A near-fully natural formula moves slowly, drifts a lot on skin, and resists standardization. That is why some references exist as vintages, Oud Maximus 2019 and then Oud Maximus 2020, each harvest yielding a different oil. Few houses will state that instability out loud. Bortnikoff turns it into method.

Oud sits at the center, though not always in the same role. In the Ouds range it is the subject, sorted by origin: Laos, India, Malaysia. In recent releases it becomes the floor. The summer 2026 pair, Cuir de Cerise and Sambac Rouge, both open on cherry and then split, one toward leather and agarwood, the other toward sambac jasmine and red fruit. For a house identified with oud, that displacement is an authorial decision.

Activities

Bortnikoff writes the formulas and also supplies himself. Agarwood and sandalwood sourcing, distillation, tincturing and bottling all sit inside the house, in unbroken continuity with Feel-Oud. That vertical setup explains the commercial shape of the catalog: very short runs, sold direct through the official store and a handful of specialist retailers, references that vanish once the material is gone, and an organization by category, Entry Level Collection, Main Collection, Ouds, Colognes and Attars, rather than by narrative collection.

One qualification is worth stating, because it usually gets flattened. The house carries Dmitry Bortnikoff's name and he signs its compositions, but it is no longer strictly a one-nose operation: his son Maxim Bortnikoff, trained alongside him and in Bangkok, released his own first perfume under the label in 2023, Le Voyage Oriental. The perfumes credited to Dmitry stay credited to Dmitry, but the workshop has started handing down.

Signature perfumes

Documented Bortnikoff compositions, all credited to Dmitry Bortnikoff; the house does not date every release, so years come from specialist databases and, for 2026, from the official site's own timestamps.

Olfactory signature

What identifies a Bortnikoff is material density of a kind industrial perfumery does not manufacture. House-distilled agarwood is the axis, surrounded by sandalwood, musk, vetiver and resins. The compositions unfold slowly, without a showy top note, and travel a long way over several hours. That is how a formula loaded with naturals behaves, and it is accepted as such rather than corrected.

The second marker is variability. Where a conventional house locks a formula for a decade, Bortnikoff lets the harvest change the perfume and publishes vintages instead. The catalog therefore advances in small quantities, with references that appear and then go dark. In practice this is perfumery for oil collectors, an audience that values raw-material quality over consistency.

Key characteristics

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