Oud or Oudh is by far one of the most expensive raw fragrance ingredients in the world, therefore, Oud lovers are characterized by elegance and luxury in their choices, and Oud is indeed one of the most expensive and desirable perfume ingredients in the world. It has an intoxicating musky scent that can be quite potent and has been used for centuries in India, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. Today, many perfumers in the West are using it as a base to create some amazing perfumes for men and women.
How Does Oud Get Produced?
Wood chips off agarwood trees are often burned as incense, and it's common for them to be used during religious ceremonies and various celebrations throughout Southeast Asia and the Middle East, including China, Japan, and India
When the wood of this tree gets infected with a parasitic mold called Phialophora, it reacts by producing a precious, dark, and fragrant resin. This is the perfume ingredient oud.
Types of Oud :
Oud (in Arabic Oudh) is valued strongly by perfumers for its warm sweetness mixed with woody and balsamic notes. It's an aromatic and complex scent. It is used in the form of oud oil (dehn al oud) or resin (oud mubakhar). When used in a perfume composition, an oud is most often a base note. Essential in every perfume, unlike top notes and middle notes, base notes tend to stay on the skin long after the others dissipate. In a perfume with an oud base, it's likely you'll catch a whiff of it alone hours after applying it.
How Oud perfumes are made :
The infection
Since the resin is only released after an infection of the mold, only one out of ten trees may have an infected heartwood. In fact, a total of two percent of these wild agar trees produce oud.
Expert artisans seek out these rare infected trees due to the unique superior aroma of the oud.
The mold infection naturally takes a long time to produce oud.
Sometimes wounds are created artificially to provoke an infection. This artificial process may help yield harvesting agarwood faster, but the oud produced this way lacks the concentration of that made from natural infection just like cultured versus natural pearls.
Processing
Then the agarwood chips are soaked in water for a while until they become soft and ready for distillation. There are more than 150 grades within agarwood substances and each of them has a distinct smell.
The artisans separate different grades of agarwood that can produce different essences of pure oud. This is an extraordinary art. These artisans are extremely skilled in finding out and differentiating many different grades of agarwood.
Distillation process
The process of distillation from oud wood to oud oil is quite vast. However, here is a brief summary. The resinous wood chips are ground into tiny pieces like powder which are then soaked into water and left for a considerable amount of time to ferment properly. Then the ingredients are transferred to distillation vessels for steaming.
After heating with adequate temperature, the wood particles release oud oil that floats on the top portion of the water as it is lighter. The condensed water along with oud oil is received in a vessel and then pure oud oil is dissociated from water and kept in a separate container.
Final Oud Oils
The pure oud oil is left in open sunlight so that any excess moisture within the pure oil can evaporate over time. This assures that the oil is as pure as possible.
In general, two distillation methods are common. Water- or hydro-distillation is commonly used in India, Thailand, and Cambodia, while forced steam distillation is more common in Indonesia.
These techniques help extract their distinct aromas on the final oud oils. These pure oud oils have historically been valued for making perfumes and incense across many cultures in the world especially Indian, Chinese, and Arabian, making it one of the costliest raw ingredients in the fragrant world.
Final words
Oud is by far one of the most expensive natural perfumes in the world. To understand the rationality of its value, it’s worth knowing how oud perfumes are made and how it they smell. If you ever experience its mesmerizing deep, heavy, woody, warm, animatic, and balsamic notes that don’t have any analog in the world, you will definitely agree with its value.
Here you can check out our Pure and Natural Oud Perfume.
