Russian Adam

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Training and career

Russian Adam is the working name of the man behind Areej Le Doré. His civil name, Ivan Inkin, comes from Parfumo and is carried by Osmetheca's house entry; the brand itself publishes only the alias. Everything else is closed off: no birth date, no home town, no official portrait circulates. The house does not communicate on any of it, and the reticence is plainly part of how the brand presents itself.

The one documented stretch of biography comes from a long 2017 interview with the Kafkaesque blog. He describes studying in Australia, where he converted to Islam, then moving to London for a master's degree in business management. It was in London mosques that he first met Arabian perfumery, mostly synthetic, along with an expensive oud he initially found repellent and then could not stop smelling. That contradiction, by his own account, started everything. No perfumery training appears anywhere in his path: no school, no composition house, no apprenticeship.

Dissatisfied with the oils he could buy, he drew a blunt conclusion: the only way to get exactly what you want is to make it yourself. He moved to Thailand, met a fellow Russian oud obsessive who became his business partner, and launched the distilling operation Feel Oud with him, around 2013 or 2014 depending on the source. Dmitry Bortnikoff's official page dates the co-founding of that same company to 2013, and in 2022 Kafkaesque still described Bortnikoff as Russian Adam's former Feel Oud partner. Areej Le Doré followed in 2017, trademarked in the United Kingdom, launched from Thailand, and run today out of Indonesia.

Approach and method

His official Perfumer page states the foundation in one line: over several years he distilled close to a hundred different types of pure, high quality agarwood oil. That is where the distinctiveness sits. He talks in distillation variables rather than notes, and argues that the nose registers minute shifts a still setting is enough to produce. The perfumery follows from the conviction: composition mostly organizes materials he manufactured himself.

Moving into finished perfume was a matter of widening the vocabulary. The house says he wanted to add a broader range of exclusive and rare ingredients to oud in order to build more complex pieces. The recurring materials are well known: Siberian deer musk, ambergris, sandalwood, rose, sambac jasmine, oakmoss, nearly always worked as house tinctures and macerations rather than bought as standard absolutes. The heavy animalic base, which many find difficult, is a standing choice rather than an accident.

The result is an extrait perfumery that borrows density from the Arabian attar while keeping a Western architecture. The brand describes its own project as a crossing of three traditions: Russian depth and intensity, Arabian mystery, French elegance. Nepalese Patchouli, released in July 2026, shows the working method: Nepalese patchouli carried by a multi-layer co-tincture of black truffle, orris, wild Siberian deer musk and civet, infused under vacuum and ultrasound. The process is not marketing garnish; it is what stands in for a synthetic base.

Activities

Russian Adam holds jobs that elsewhere occupy four people: he selects the wood, distills, tinctures, composes, bottles and sells. That vertical arrangement shapes the catalog. Areej Le Doré runs no permanent collections but successive waves, announced on social accounts, opened for pre-order, sold out and replaced. Bottles are engraved and numbered by hand. A sold-out reference is generally not reissued identically, because the raw material behind it no longer exists in usable quantity.

Alongside the perfume house he stays active in raw materials: Feel Oud, the oil brand that predates Areej Le Doré, is still distributed, and Parfumo states that he does so jointly with Dmitry Bortnikoff. That is the only documented point of contact between the two men today. It is worth spelling out, because the confusion is common: Russian Adam and Dmitry Bortnikoff are two different perfumers, running two different houses, who shared one distilling company before going their own ways.

Signature perfumes

Areej Le Doré publishes waves rather than permanent collections; these are documented reference points from the catalog, all signed by Russian Adam, leaving aside the numbered II and III versions that reopen the same signatures.

Olfactory signature

Russian Adam's signature is recognizable exactly where other perfumers pull back: animality. Deer musk, civet, ambergris and heavily fermented ouds appear at doses mainstream niche perfumery does not use. That weight is nearly always offset by a natural floral tier, rose, sambac jasmine, white flowers, which keeps a composition from collapsing into shock value.

The second constant is the near-total absence of synthetic bases from the classic compositions. It shows in behavior: openings can be rough, development runs long, and the base is still there hours after the top drawing has gone. It also shows in economics. Perfumes built this way can only exist in very small batches, which is what turned Areej Le Doré into a collectors' house as much as a perfume house.

Key characteristics

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