The Art Behind Luxury Fragrance
HIMBA is an urban fragrance brand that continues Africa's long legacy of perfume by combining exceptional ingredients produced by rural African communication with the cutting edge expertise of an experienced global team.
Perfume's rich history dates back thousands of years, and Africa has long been the source of many exceptional ingredients. Farmers plant and tend to herbs, flowers, and trees famed for their scents.
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The Himba are an indigenous people with an estimated population of about 50,000 people living in northern Namibia, in the Kunene Region (formerly Kaokoland) and on the other side of the Kunene River in southern Angola.
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Himba tribe is perhaps best known for colouring their hair and bodies with a red colour paste (otjize), which is considered a sign of beauty. The otjize mixture is beautiful, scented with aromatic resins, deep in orange colour symbolizing the earth's red color and blood—the essence of life.
Himba women searching for raw ingredients
One of the most remarkable Himba traits is that women are not allowed to use water for washing. Again, according to the elderly, this dates back to the great droughts where water was scarce, and only men were allowed access to water for washing purposes. Apart from applying red ochre on their skin
Himba women collecting Myrrh Omumbiri from trees
The red ochre is a cream that the Himba are famous for, it is made by pounding the ochre stone (Hematite) into small pieces. After that, the fragments are mixed with butter, slightly heated using smoke and applied on the skin.
The main reason for the red ochre is to establish a difference between men and women. Moreover, the red layer seems to help against the scorching sun radiation, while keeping the skin clean and moist, and to some extent, it blocks hair growth on the body.
Women harvest a potent perfumed tree resin called omumbiri (Commiphora wildii) to mix with red ochre as a beauty treatment. The sticky resin, produced in the dry months of October and November, is also known as Myrrh Omumbiri.
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