The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
Mahsam Raza composed 1 And Only Parfum for The Dua Brand's Inspired Expression line, which also sits within the Dua Designer Line, released in 2026. The brief was straightforward: rebuild a warm-spicy masculine composition with a stripped-down note architecture. Black pepper and Tarocco orange do the opening work, labdanum carries the middle, tobacco anchors the base. The result is a deliberate exercise in restraint, a fragrance that commits to its four ingredients without ornamentation. Raza's approach here places each note where it serves the structure. Black pepper delivers a clean heat at the top, its sharpness tempered by the juicy brightness of the orange.
The interesting choice is what got left out. Most tobacco fragrances this warm build toward vanilla, tonka, or sweetness to soften the leaf. 1 And Only Parfum skips that move. Labdanum, a resin with its own sticky amber sweetness, does the softening instead. That substitution changes the texture considerably. The resin keeps an edge of bitterness underneath the sweetness, and the absence of vanillic cushion means the tobacco never rounds into pure comfort food.
The evolution
The first twenty minutes are all pepper and orange, bright and slightly sharp, the kind of opening that announces itself across a desk. The orange softens first, losing its juice and leaving behind the dry, almost dusty quality of orange peel left on a counter overnight. Pepper holds longer, a steady warmth rather than a sting, and as the minutes pass it loses its crisp top note and becomes rounder, more like crushed peppercorn steeped in warm oil. By the one-hour mark labdanum has taken over completely, and the composition shifts register. This is where it stops being a citrus-spice number and becomes something richer, stickier, more contemplative. The labdanum enters almost like a curtain being pulled, its resinous sweetness spreading across the skin with a faintly bitter, almost medicinal undertone that gives the heart its character.
Cultural impact
This is the kind of release that lives or dies on its tobacco drydown, and that's a polarizing brief. Wearers who want their tobacco sweet and vanillic will find this too dry, too resinous. Those who want tobacco that reads honest, like cured leaf rather than confection, will appreciate what Raza did here. It occupies a specific niche in the tobacco-amber conversation, pulling the warm-spicy masculine idea into a leaner, less cushioned territory than most mainstream designer tobacco fragrances tend to offer.
