The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
Anubis Kiss takes its name from the Egyptian god who guards the threshold between worlds. The idea wasn't simply to create a dark fragrance, it was to capture a specific quality of transition: the moment when warmth becomes weight, when sweet becomes smoke. Perfumer Hany Hafez built the composition around oud as a gravitational center, then pulled it in two directions at once with incense and cannabis on one side, tobacco and resins on the other. The result is a fragrance that feels like it exists in a room before you enter it.
The choice of cannabis as a structural element sets this apart from the typical smoky-woody template. It's not decorative, it functions as the green thread that keeps the smoke from becoming flat, the resin from becoming syrupy. Frankincense enters midway, serving as a clarifying agent that lifts and stabilizes rather than adds. Together, these materials create an accord that reads as both ancient and contemporary: temple smoke filtered through modern chemistry, the kind of thing Hany Hafez has been building since Alexandria Fragrances launched in 2017.
The evolution
The opening hits fast, incense smoke first, then the green complexity of cannabis pushing through. There's no gentle transition here. The oud arrives within minutes, dense and resinous, as if it were always there waiting beneath the surface. By the second hour, the frankincense has clarified the composition, pulling the smoke into something more translucent. The drydown settles into tobacco and resin, dark, sweet, lasting well past what most fragrances consider a full runtime. On fabric, it lingers overnight. On skin, it announces itself for hours and then quietly refuses to leave.
Cultural impact
Anubis Kiss occupies a specific niche in the contemporary fragrance landscape: dark, resinous compositions with a hashish-adjacent character. It's frequently compared to Nasomatto's Black Afgano, both share that smoky-woody-resinous axis and the distinctive green cannabis note. The difference is accessibility. Anubis Kiss offers the same character at a fraction of the cost, which has made it a quiet entry point for wearers curious about the genre but hesitant to commit to higher price points.
