The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
Split Of Berry Banana arrived in 2025 from The Dua Brand, composed by house perfumer Mahsam Raza. The brief landed at the workshop the way most Dua briefs do: with a gourmand profile carrying backbone, the kind of composition that flirts openly with sweetness but never lets it have the last word. Raza built it around a citrus entry where lemon and bitter orange snap the formula awake, then let the cream notes arrive late and stay. The opening behaves almost like a correction, a brisk slap of citrus that pulls the air in and forces your attention forward before anything rich has a chance to bloom. Once the brightness fades, banana ice cream and pistachio settle in, but they never wear their dessert costume cheaply.
What makes the composition interesting is the structural see-saw between fruit and base. Most gourmand fragrances lead with sugar and arrive at something darker; this one leads with citrus bitterness and arrives at sugar. The pistachio cream and tonka absolute in the base do the heavy lifting, while Indian sandalwood and Ambroxan stop the vanilla from tipping into pure confection. The strawberry ice cream note sits in the orange blossom heart, which gives it a floral lift. It's deliberate architecture underneath what looks like a playful top line, and that tension is the entire game.
The evolution
Bitter orange and Italian lemon open with a sharp, blink-inducing brightness that cuts straight through the room. Then the orange blossom arrives and the whole thing pivots into something softer, a warm yellow cream laced with strawberry. The banana warms up alongside the pistachio, and the sugar starts to layer, building into a plush texture that feels almost edible. Eventually you're firmly in caramel and vanilla territory, with a sandalwood hum underneath keeping the sweetness from going flat. The Ambroxan in the base shows up as a clean amber-musk breathe that keeps the projection from collapsing, a quiet structural beam holding the softer materials aloft.
Cultural impact
Split Of Berry Banana lands in 2025 carrying the kind of playful gourmand signature that The Dua Brand has built into a recognizable house style. The banana-ice-cream accord here sits squarely inside that sweet-leaning identity, treating fruit as something indulgent rather than incidental. The polarizing nature of the banana accord is part of its draw: it provokes reactions, splits opinion, and rewards anyone willing to follow it past the obvious sweetness into the pistachio and cream underneath.
