Oud
Dark, smoky wood with leathery, resinous, slightly animal-like warmth.
You may know it from Agarwood incense
Where it comes from
From resin-rich agarwood, or recreated with aroma chemicals.
Worth knowing
It means agarwood, not the Middle Eastern stringed instrument.
About oud
Oud is agarwood, the dark, resin-soaked heartwood of Aquilaria trees, which grow in rainforest from India and Bangladesh across Southeast Asia to southern China, Borneo and New Guinea. A healthy tree smells of very little. The resin forms when the wood is wounded and infected by a fungus, as the tree's defence, and in the wild that takes decades.
Wild trees were cut faster than they could recover. CITES listed Aquilaria malaccensis on Appendix II in 1995 and every Aquilaria species in 2004, which means the trade needs permits, though it is not banned. Plantations in Southeast Asia now infect cultivated trees on purpose; one review reports resin after as little as six months that way, against twenty years or more in nature. Plantation wood sells as a lower grade and costs far less, but the resin is still made by the tree.
The smell comes from sesquiterpenes and a rarer group of compounds, the 2-(2-phenylethyl)chromones, with well over a hundred components in the oil. Perfume Shrine describes real oud as smoky and deeply woody, with green, mouldy, nutty and earthy facets. Distillers need freshly infected wood, because the oil cells dry out within months. Prices for chips run from about £20 to £6,000 a kilo depending on resin content, and the oil costs a great deal more.
At those prices, retailers who sell both say most "oud" in mainstream perfume is an accord of synthetics. No measurement of that share turned up. Industry bases for it include Firmenich's Oud Synthetic and Givaudan's Agarwood Orpur. Agarwood has been burned as incense for millennia, and Wikipedia traces it to the Vedas. Perfume Shrine follows its route into Western perfume through YSL M7, Tom Ford Oud Wood and niche houses like Montale and Amouage.
Accords it shows up in
How many of the fragrances listing Oud in our catalogue also carry each accord. We counted this ourselves.
Often paired with
The notes that appear next to Oud most often in our catalogue.
Well-known fragrances with Oud
Fragrances that list it in their notes, most-rated first.
Houses that use it most
Ranked by how many of their well-known fragrances list Oud.