Abu Dhabi: It’s a massive metal pot filled with big chunks of chopped oud and, just for a moment, you wonder if it isn’t too heavy for Umm Bader to be able to stir the contents but she insists it is not as she deftly turns the large quantity of oud chunks with a shovel. But, first, she pours a generous quantity of her home-made perfume over them till they are steeped in the liquid. Then, satisfied that they are immersed, she covers the pot with a lid and steps away. The mixture is not to be disturbed for around two to three months.
“The wood has to absorb the perfume and soften. The longer you leave it, the better,” says Umm Bader.
She has been making perfumes and local incense such as oud, bakhoor and mokhamaria in Abu Dhabi for over 40 years. The floor of the room where she works has a number of large metal bowls filled with various types of bakhoor and oud. Except for one wall that has her working bench placed against it, the others have shelves from top to bottom on which stand hundreds of containers containing floral essences and exotic ingredients such as deer glands, eastern oils, henna and saffron.
A box of notebooks containing 40 years’ worth of perfume formulations sits on the bench along with countless labelled perfume bottles in all shapes, sizes and colours. The room could easily be a potion-making classroom straight out of a Harry Potter movie.
She knows every scent and its characteristics and what exactly it will best combine with. “When you are mixing so many ingredients together, one wrong addition can ruin your entire perfume. You have to know what blends well with what,” Umm Bader explains.
Oud and bakhoor are popular burning incenses among Arabs used to get rid of cooking smells and generally acting as air fresheners. She burns an amount of each to show the difference between the purity of her products and those of others.
Then she reaches out for a large glass that holds mokhamaria and dips a wooden stick into the bright red liquid and rubs the stick on her black scarf. “This is a very old traditional Emirati product. It is a mix of perfumes [her own] and mist but the main ingredient is saffron. It is dabbed on the hair, behind the ears or generally on black clothes as saffron will leave its tint on fabric,” she explains.
Umm Bader began making perfumes in 1975. “I used to watch my mother-in-law make perfume at home and I asked her to teach me,” she says. Making perfumes and incense at home was a common practice among Emirati women in the old days, she notes.
Her love for perfumes is what eventually pushed her in this direction. Initially, her husband would buy her perfumes whenever he travelled and this continued till she decided to make her own.
Talking about the first batch of bakhoor makes Umm Bader break into a smile. “I was so happy, I still remember it,” she says.
Bakhoor, she explains, is basically oud sticks ground and mixed with a number of perfumes and mists and left for about 10 days for the scent to deepen and develop.
Once she realised her passion for making perfumes, she started to experiment. In the process, she has developed hundreds of scents. “Once I go into my room and start working, I forget all about time. I can be in there for hours,” she says.
Just the previous day, she had started at 4pm and did not emerge from the room till 1am. “I forgot the time, forgot to have dinner,” she says, breaking into a laugh.
Born with a strong sense of smell, which her daughter Manal jokingly alludes to as having the ability to pick up a scent 10 minutes before anyone else does, Umm Bader decided to let her imagination chart a new path of olfactory adventure rather than follow the traditional scented trail.
The result was an endless number of perfumes that soon were in demand by those who knew her.
“When people visited me, they always asked me what [perfume] I was wearing because it smelt so good,” she said.
Around 2005, on the advice of one of her sisters, she decided to start selling her products and so she joined the Mubdia’h Programme, organised by Abu Dhabi Business Women Council, which allows Emirati women to practise their business at home.
She sold most of her products at get-togethers at home by inviting women to come and try them out. Seeing her scents earn praise and worn by others made her happy but she also had to deal with her share of negative feedback when many women questioned her decision to sell her products and earn money despite being well off. Others commented on the long hours and physical effort required for this pursuit and if, being a woman, it was necessary for her to do all this.
After about eight years of working from home, fed up of the comments, she decided to set up a shop and share her products with the wider public.
However, this idea did not win her much support even from her immediate family, with the exception of her daughter Manal. Umm Bader jokes that her husband even offered to buy her business out so she need not work, because of the amount of time she spent developing and making her products.
Mother and daughter decided to give their products a facelift with new bottling, a new brand name and went on a search for the perfect location. They decided to name her brand Nefayef Perfumes, a nickname Umm Bader was called meaning ‘drizzling rain’, and soon after, found a shop in Abu Dhabi’s Delma Mall. With a new name, location and new packaging, her products were an instant hit among Emiratis and expatriates.
“It was amazing, everything just happened and came together,” said her daughter Manal.
Umm Bader’s passion to make perfumes is still the same as the day she started. “I don’t do this for money, I do it because I love it, this is what I love to do,” she said. The business is something she has built herself and is very proud of. “I made it all, from nothing,” she says.
She refuses to compromise on the quality of her products by using fewer ingredients so they can be sold cheaper or cutting down on the time required to develop the perfume to increase turnover. The latter, she says, results in scents that do not linger.
Today, Umm Bader is one of the few Emirati women who makes her perfumes at home and sells them at a shop as compared to many of her compatriots who only sell their products at festivals or from home, like she used to.
Her passion for her pursuit is reflected in the way she patiently opens one bottle of perfume after another to make you smell all of them and then, lovingly, puts each bottle back in place.
She has other ideas to continue the local tradition of making perfume and incense and also hopes to branch out to other emirates, beginning with Dubai.
