The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
High Skies arrived in 2025 as part of The Dua Brand's Inspired Expression collection, composed by Mahsam Raza. It's a woody aromatic built on a simple, modern idea: put pomelo and black pepper at the top, run a thread of hemp through the middle, and let palo santo do the smoky work while vetiver anchors the ground. The reference is clear to anyone familiar with Byredo's Open Sky, and Dua's whole project is exactly this kind of translation. Take a composition that costs a premium, study its architecture, rebuild it with ingredients that meet safety regulations and price constraints, and put it in a clear glass bottle with clean sans-serif type. High Skies fits that brief without overreaching. It's a 2025 release that knows what it's doing and doesn't pretend otherwise.
Hemp is the unusual choice here, and it's what gives High Skies its specific character. Most woody aromatics reach for lavender, geranium, or juniper to bridge citrus and smoke. Hemp brings a dry, leafy, faintly vegetal greenness that reads more like open air than like a plant in a field. Combined with palo santo's sacred-wood smoke and vetiver's rooty dryness, the composition builds a landscape that feels elevated, not earthy. The pomelo and black pepper keep it bright and modern instead of herbal-retro.
The evolution
The first ten minutes belong to the pomelo. It's bright, almost juicy, and the black pepper adds a dry bite that keeps the sweetness honest. Around the twenty-minute mark the hemp starts showing up, not as a loud green note but as a shift in texture, like the air thinning out. By the one-hour point the palo santo has settled in underneath, and the smoke is doing most of the talking. It's a soft smoke, more like smoldering wood than a campfire, and it wraps around the vetiver for the rest of the wear. On skin, the citrus fades by hour three, but the palo santo-vetiver base holds for the full 4-6 hour arc, and the next morning what lingers is a clean woodsmoke ghost on the collar of a shirt. Moderate sillage means it stays close, a personal radius rather than a cloud, which suits the composition's quiet confidence.
Cultural impact
High Skies sits in a specific corner of the fragrance world: the woody aromatic that wants altitude, not warmth. Pomelo and hemp over palo santo reads modern, almost outdoorsy, and it's the kind of scent that appeals to someone who already owns a few vetiver-heavy fragrances and wants something cleaner and more lifted. In a market crowded with oud-and-amber beasts, this is the composition that prefers open windows over closed doors.
