The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
Russian Adam's War and Peace was the fastest sold-out release in Areej Le Doré's history. A year later, in 2020, he returned to the same vocabulary of animalic richness and ancient materials, but pushed further into darkness. War and Peace Part II is described as a slightly more resinous, sweeter, and less powdery continuation of the original. The brief was simple: take what worked and make it last longer, project harder, lean into the things that made the first one unforgettable to the people who loved it and polarizing to everyone else.
The most striking material here is the co-absolute of wild Siberian deer musk, ambergris, and castoreum that Russian Adam created specifically for this composition. These three materials have a natural synergy, each one amplifies and stabilizes the others, and together they form a base that no synthetic accord can fully replicate. The 35-million-year-old amber resin that opens the fragrance adds a geological weight to the top, making it feel less like a conventional perfume opening and more like an ancient artifact being slowly warmed to life.
The evolution
The Himalayan amber opens with the smell of something excavated, not grown, mineral and resinous and old in a way that citrus or floral notes never are. For the first thirty minutes it dominates, holding the animalic heart at bay while the Indian rose absolute and Taif rose slowly saturate the air around it. Then the castoreum arrives. Not dramatically, it doesn't announce itself, but you realize the leather note has become the room's texture rather than its accent. The deer musk follows. This is where War and Peace Part II earns its name: the tension between beauty and restraint, between the roses and the animalic truth underneath. The drydown holds for ten or more hours on most skin, fading from bold sillage to a close, warm presence that stays with you into the next day.
Cultural impact
War and Peace Part II sits in a category of one. It is not trying to be accessible or crowd-pleasing, it is a composition for people who actively seek out animalic materials and want them presented without apology. The reception among those who connect with it tends to be intense loyalty; the fragrance occupies the same serious, material-driven space as the finest traditional attars.
