The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
Into The Galaxy dropped in 2023, part of The Dua Brand's Original Blend Collection, and it's the kind of release that earns its name without taking itself too seriously. Mahsam Raza composed the formula as an Oriental Vanilla hybrid, a gourmand detour that bends fruity and floral facets into something denser, creamier, and far more dessert-adjacent than the label suggests. Raza's brief wasn't to interpret space but to evoke what drifting through it might feel like if galaxies were made of confection instead of stars. The opening gives you cherry and almond in a swirl of sweetness, a maraschino glow that feels candied but never cloying, lifted by the softness of rose and the gentle hum of jasmine underneath.
What makes the composition worth dissecting is how many directions it tries to pull at once, and how often it succeeds. Fruity cherry and raspberry carry the top, creamy almond and orris bridge into the heart, and the base gathers tonka, vanilla, cacao, and coffee into something that reads almost roasted. Pink pepper and cardamom throw sparks across the whole thing, keeping the sweetness from going slack. Most gourmand compositions lean hard into one lane: pure sugar, pure spice, pure floral. Into The Galaxy insists on all of them at once, and the collision is the point.
The evolution
The first ten minutes taste like a cherry-almond tart, bright and a little sharp from the pink pepper and cardamom underneath. There's fruit here, real fruit-skin tartness, not the candied version. Tuberose and orris slide in around the 30-minute mark, powdering the fruit edges and softening the cardamom's bite into something almost milky. The raspberry goes a bit jammy, the almond gets marzipan-heavy. By the second hour, the gourmand base settles in: tonka and vanilla doing the heavy lifting, with cacao and coffee underneath pulling everything darker. The coffee note is restrained, more like the memory of espresso than a fresh pull, but it stops the sweetness from coasting. Six hours in, what's left is a close-skin blend of tonka, sandalwood, and a whisper of vanilla. It doesn't project much past the midpoint, but it sticks around quietly, the kind of drydown that still gets a sniff from your own wrist the next morning.
Cultural impact
Into The Galaxy sits within The Dua Brand's wider catalog of gourmand-leaning releases, a space the house returns to often across its lineup. The composition itself is a layered take on the Oriental Vanilla family, pulling cherry, almond, rose, jasmine, tonka, coffee, cacao, and vanilla into a single arc that reads sweet at the top and roasted by the drydown. Early on, the cherry and almond do most of the talking, giving the scent a confectionary lift that feels like opening a tin of cherry-almond pastry.
