The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
Butterfly X Aslan Gülçiçek was one of the collaborations CZAR released when the brand opened in 2018, a partnership with Turkish perfumer Aslan Gülçiçek that introduced an approach worth paying attention to. The model's logic is plain: invite a perfumer, give them space, and let the bottle carry their name. No house signature crowding the composition, no proprietary accord stamping ownership across the formula. Just a brief, a conversation, and a finished scent. Butterfly was released through this framework, letting Gülçiçek's sensibility take the lead while CZAR handled production and the platform behind it.
What's interesting here is the restraint. In Butterfly, oud functions as a bass note rather than a statement, a texture that darkens the composition without taking it over. The pine does the structural work, giving the scent its backbone and its sense of cold altitude, while geranium introduces a green, almost medicinal sharpness that keeps the whole thing from sinking into something flat and resinous. White musk then seals the base with a clean, skin-close warmth. The result is a fragrance that uses oud as texture rather than topic.
The evolution
The first thirty minutes feel like stepping outside at dawn into a stand of conifers. Pine hits first, sharp and resinous, with that just-crushed-needle quality, and geranium threads through it with a green, slightly rosy bitterness that keeps the cold from feeling synthetic. It's bright. Almost bracing. You might wonder where the oud went, because it doesn't announce itself; it simply darkens the edges of the pine, turning what could read as an air freshener into something with weight and gravity. The geranium eventually loosens its grip, and the heart of the composition opens up into something quieter and more ambiguous: still green, but now warmer, now closer to skin, the oud and white musk starting to register as presence rather than as individual materials. By the third or fourth hour, the pine has faded to a memory and what's left is musk against oud against warmth. Not loud.
Cultural impact
Butterfly was released in 2018 and has since become a reference point in the brand's growing catalog of named-perfumer collaborations. Gülçiçek contributed additional work to CZAR, including Tiger, Falcon, and Stallion, fragrances that share his sensibility for tension between green and resinous materials. The Velvet Collection framing groups Butterfly within a specific release series. For people who like to track perfumers by name and follow their trajectory across different houses, Gülçiçek's body of work for CZAR offers a coherent sample.
