A wood that only smells of anything once it is diseased — and the most expensive raw material in perfumery.
Definition
Oud, or agarwood, is the resin-saturated heartwood formed inside trees of the genus Aquilaria — chiefly A. malaccensis, A. crassna and A. sinensis — in response to fungal infection and injury. Healthy Aquilaria wood is pale, light and effectively odourless. The perfumery material exists only where the tree has mounted a defensive response, laying down a dark oleoresin through the affected tissue.
In trade, “oud” refers both to the wood itself, burned as incense, and to the oil obtained from it by hydrodistillation. Only a small fraction of wild trees are infected, and infection cannot be identified from outside the tree, which is the root of both the material’s price and its conservation problem.
Olfactory character
Extremely complex and highly variable between origins. A representative profile runs from a sharp, medicinal, almost barnyard opening through a body of dark resinous wood, leather, smoke and dried fruit, into a long sweet-animalic base. Good oil is dense rather than loud, and it lasts on skin for days.
Regional character is real and consistently reported. Indian and Assamese oils tend toward barnyard, animalic and fermented; Cambodian and Thai oils toward sweeter, fruitier, more balsamic profiles; Malaysian and Indonesian oils toward woody-camphoraceous; Chinese and Vietnamese material toward incense and dried plum. Western noses often find the animalic end difficult, and Western compositions typically use reconstructions pitched toward the sweet-woody register instead.
Historical development
Agarwood has been traded for at least two thousand years and appears in Sanskrit, Chinese and Arabic sources as an incense material of the highest rank. Its use in the Gulf as a burned wood and as an oil applied to skin and clothing is continuous and predates European perfumery entirely; in Japan it is the central material of kōdō, the codified appreciation of incense.
Western fine fragrance ignored it almost completely until the turn of this century. Yves Saint Laurent M7 (2002, Alberto Morillas and Jacques Cavallier under Tom Ford’s creative direction) is generally credited as the first mainstream Western fragrance built around it, and it sold poorly at the time.
The category arrived properly with Montale’s oud line and then Tom Ford Oud Wood (2007), after which oud became a standing commercial genre. Almost none of that market uses much real oil: the boom was made possible by synthetic reconstructions, of which Firmenich’s Oud Synthetic 10760 is the most cited.
Materials
Agarwood oil, hydrodistilled or steam-distilled from ground infected heartwood, typically after a period of soaking that begins a fermentation — the source of much of the barnyard character in traditional oils. Yields are very low and distillation runs long. CO2 extracts and tinctures of the wood are also traded, and the wood itself is sold in graded chips for burning at prices that can exceed the oil.
No single molecule smells of oud. Reconstructions are accords, built from woody-phenolic and animalic materials: guaiacol and other phenols for the smoky-medicinal side, isobutyl quinoline and birch tar for leather, Norlimbanol and cypriol for dry wood, castoreum and labdanum notes for depth. Captive bases — Firmenich’s Oud Synthetic 10760, Givaudan’s Agarwood accords — supply most of the market’s “oud”.
A fragrance can honestly be described as an oud composition while containing no Aquilaria material at all, and most do.
Grading and quality
Oud is the least standardised material in commercial perfumery, and the retail market for it contains a great deal of adulteration and misdescription. The variables that matter are species, geographic origin, whether the tree was wild or cultivated, the degree of resin saturation in the wood, the length and method of distillation, and whether the oil has been soaked and fermented before distilling.
Practical checks: insist on species and origin in writing, expect a gas-chromatographic profile from any serious supplier, and treat prices far below the market range as evidence of dilution with sandalwood, dipterocarpus or synthetic oud base. “Wild” claims are common, frequently unverifiable, and in most cases legally fraught. Age is also traded on — oils are sold as matured lots, on the argument that the sharper medicinal top settles over years.
Sourcing and sustainability
All Aquilaria and Gyrinops species are listed in CITES Appendix II, so any international movement of wood, chips or oil requires export permits. Aquilaria malaccensis was listed in 1995 and the genus followed in 2005, after decades of destructive harvesting: because infection is invisible from outside, wild collection meant felling trees speculatively.
Commercial supply is now predominantly plantation-grown. Cultivated Aquilaria in Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, India and China is inoculated deliberately — by drilling, wounding or injecting fungal or chemical agents — and harvested on a defined cycle. Plantation oil is generally judged lighter and less complex than good wild material, and it is what the legitimate market runs on.
For a formulator the honest position is that oud at scale means either plantation oil with permits or a synthetic reconstruction. Wild agarwood is not a supply chain that can absorb commercial volume, and material offered as wild should be assumed to be a compliance risk until documented otherwise.
Safety and regulation
The regulatory burden here is a trade and provenance question rather than a dermatological one — the opposite of the mossy wedge.
Common accords
Fragrance families
Oud sits in the woody wedge but functions as an oriental material in practice, and most compositions using it are woody-orientals. It also feeds leather and incense structures directly. Its arrival created a commercial category of its own, which is unusual for a single raw material and reflects how much of the effect comes from the accord rather than the tree.
Examples
Yves Saint Laurent M7 (2002) is the historical marker; Tom Ford Oud Wood (2007) is the commercial one, and set the template of oud softened with sandalwood, cardamom and vanilla. Montale’s oud range through the mid-2000s established the sharper, more medicinal Western reading.
Maison Francis Kurkdjian Oud (2012) and the Amouage and Arabian Oud lines are the usual references for higher-concentration treatments. As with the mossy wedge, published note lists should not be read as evidence of real Aquilaria content.
Historical terminology
ʿūd is Arabic for wood or stick; the same material is agarwood or aloeswood in English trade, gaharu in Malay and Indonesian, jinkō (“sinking incense”) in Japanese, and chénxiāng in Chinese. Kyara or kinam denotes the highest grade in Japanese and Chinese usage and is priced accordingly. “Oud” on a Western label is a marketing term with no material guarantee behind it.