Adill Ali

About

Adill Ali is a London-born perfumer and the founder of Hunayn, a perfume house he started in 2024. He now lives in Dubai.

He travelled widely with his family as a child and moved to Kenya at the age of seven, where the experiences behind his perfumery began. He came to scent through other arts, photography first and then poetry. At 17, through a close friend, he discovered perfume and gradually realised it was his calling. No perfumery school or mentor is documented for him, so this profile makes no training claim.

Hunayn describes itself as a house of art grounded in Islamic culture, history and tradition. Perfumery comes first and calligraphy follows: each perfume receives its name in script, and both crafts are made by hand. The house says each fragrance is crafted with natural ingredients, and it publishes long articles on the history of materials such as oud and ambergris, which Ali writes himself. Public perfume databases credit him with the Hunayn range, and in some cases name other perfumers beside him.

Outside his own house he composed Terra for the Italian brand Jijide, a fragrance about the African sunset that sets Kenyan spices, leather and oud against clean aldehydes. Jijide describes his approach as unconventional and emotional, and says oud is the ingredient he loves most.

His work draws on Islamic perfumery history and on modern independent practice, with a strong bias towards storytelling and historical research.