The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
Ascension arrived in 2025 from Adam Bujairami, a perfumer working under the Australian house bearing his name. Bujairami Perfumes has shaped its identity around a woody-aromatic sensibility, and Ascension is the entry that puts that sensibility front and center. The name suggests upward movement, elevation, a shift from base to something lighter, and the composition follows that arc in reverse, starting with herbal brightness and grounding into dark, mossy earth. Adam composed it as a men's woody aromatic, a genre that has its roots in classic barbershop fougères and its modern expression in confident, everyday wearable compositions. Ascension sits in that tradition without feeling dated, a fresh-shaded take on a structure that has been refined for decades.
What makes Ascension interesting is how tightly it controls the green. Lavender, rosemary, and petitgrain could easily tip into kitchen-cabinet territory, and neroli alongside them can swing soapy. Here, the galbanum in the heart does the heavy lifting, that bitter, resinous green that smells like a snapped twig on a warm day, pulling the top notes away from anything soft and steering them toward something more architectural. The jasmine is a whisper, not a bloom, adding a faint white sweetness rather than taking over. And the base is where the fougère DNA becomes impossible to miss: oakmoss, vetiver, cedar, sandalwood, amber.
The evolution
On skin, Ascension opens with a burst of green that reads almost medicinal in its clarity: lavender and rosemary up front, neroli brightening the edges, petitgrain adding a faint bitter peel. For the first 30 minutes it smells like a garden after rain, sharp, clean, a little cold. The clary sage and galbanum arrive next, and the composition darkens by a shade. The jasmine is there if you're looking, a pale sweetness underneath the green, but it never announces itself. Galbanum dominates this phase, that unmistakable resinous bite that makes the whole thing feel less like a cologne and more like a landscape of crushed stems and low-growing herbs. The sharpness cools over the next hour, settling into something that reads more green than bitter, the lavender receding just enough to let the sage and galbanum take the lead. By the three-hour mark, the base has settled in fully.
Cultural impact
Ascension draws on the woody aromatic and fougère-inspired template in a way that wears its references openly. The herbal top, green-galbanum heart, and mossy-woody base are all present and accounted for, and the composition lets each of those phases speak clearly without muddying the transitions. Galbanum takes a dominant role through the heart, that unmistakable resinous bite giving the middle stage a sharper, more characterful edge than you might expect from the genre. It pushes past the polite, and the result is a fragrance that feels less like a clean, safe aromatic and more like something with a little attitude.
