Naseem Carmine changed drastically after 3 months. Is my bottle defective?
I need some help from people who have experience with Naseem Carmine attar.
I bought a 15 ml bottle on 29 May 2026. When I first opened it, I absolutely loved it. It had a strong BR540-like sweet/burnt-sugar + saffron/amber character, good projection, and a noticeable dry-down. It smelled almost exactly like the Carmine I had read about in reviews.
But after around 3 months, something has changed drastically.
The fragrance I have now is nothing like what I originally smelled.
Current situation
Bottle: Naseem Carmine 15 ml
Purchased: 29 May 2026
Around 11–12 ml is still remaining
Stored in a closed wooden cupboard
Room stays relatively cool and is AC-cooled at night
No direct sunlight
Colour of the oil looks the same
No cloudiness or visible contamination
No obvious rancid/sour/metallic smell
But the performance and smell have changed massively.
I recently did a small test with one drop on tissue:
0 minutes: Very faint Carmine smell, only noticeable when smelling extremely close.
15 minutes: Almost completely gone. Only a very faint smell when putting my nose right next to it.
30 minutes: Still extremely faint, mostly floral/jasmine. Again, only detectable from around 1 cm away.
On skin, the faint smell seems to last only around 15 minutes.
The biggest thing is that it has lost the sweet, saffron, amber/BR540-like character that made me love Carmine in the first place.
At first I thought I had simply gone nose-blind to it, but I asked multiple people who had smelled the same bottle when it was new, and they also noticed that the fragrance now smells significantly different and much weaker.
I know fragrance perception is subjective, so I'm not claiming that it must be oxidation or anything specific. I'm trying to understand what could have happened.
What do you guys think?
Could this be:
oxidation?
some kind of formulation/batch issue?
something caused by the bottle itself?
normal aging/maturation, even though the change is this extreme?
or something else I'm overlooking?
And most importantly, is there anything I can safely do to restore the original smell/performance?
I don't want to add anything, heat it, leave it open, etc. without knowing what I'm doing.
I still have almost the entire bottle, so I'd really like to save it if possible.
Any advice from people who own Carmine or have experience with attars/perfume oils would be appreciated.