Yading's Light Does Not Wait

Yading’s air is thin.

4,600 meters elevation. Oxygen concentration is sixty percent of the plain. Every one hundred meters, the lungs’ workload increases a bit. At Milk Sea, the lungs are the most honest organ on your body — they will not lie that they are tired.

The three protector mountains: Xianrindong, Yangmaiyong, Xianuoduoji. They surround Milk Sea like three walls. At sunrise, sunlight from the eastern ridge hits first, then slowly moves west, the entire process lasting forty-seven minutes. During those forty-seven minutes, the lake water changes from black to gray, then from gray to a strange, bluish green.

That green is not in any paint box.

It is cold light reflected by ice and snow, plus unique ultraviolet refraction at high altitude, plus the mineral color of lake bottom sediments — three things superimposed. The perfumer tried thirty-seven times; not once was it completely right. Finally he gave up on precision, he chose to give up.

He gave up on precisely recreating that color, and instead recreated the air before that color appeared.

The air at that moment was clean. Not sterile clean — sterile is artificial, the smell of disinfectant. Clean is natural, the kind of scent carried by impurity-free light itself. High-altitude air smells “clean” because the path it has traveled is long enough, has been purified by enough snow lines, and when it finally falls into your lungs, it carries only itself.

This is the starting point of Yading, the fragrance.

Not ice and snow, not lake water, but clean.

Frankincense is one of the raw materials in its name. But the frankincense used in this fragrance is not the resin itself — it is frankincense essential oil extracted by cold extraction, diluted to 1.5 percent, leaving only that clean skeleton. That skeleton is what remains after the weight of resin minus impurities.

How much remains? About forty percent.

The remaining sixty percent is Yading itself.

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Associated Notes: [Mineral] [Ozone]