Oud in classical sources and modern perfumery

Book of Chemistry and Perfumes, Al-Kindi

Mentioned across many early perfume treatises, Al-Kindi devotes five formulas to oud in his Book of Chemistry and Perfumes. Published in the 9th century, this text exerted a considerable and lasting influence on both Eastern and Western perfumery, attesting to the early use of oud as a perfumery ingredient.

Strongly associated with the Middle East in the popular imagination, oud is in the countries of the Arabian Peninsula a precious, revered scent. Traditionally used neat-applied directly under the skin-or burned as bakhoor, blended with sandalwood and jasmine to perfume clothes and hair, the smell of oud is familiar and omnipresent in the Middle East. It permeates even today the malls and grand-hotel lobbies.

Louis XIV The Sun King - Colbert Presenting the Members of the Royal Academy of Sciences to Louis XIV in 1667, by Henri Testelin. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

While oud remained more discreet in Western perfumery for a long time, its presence is nevertheless documented across the centuries as one of perfumery’s most precious materials. The smell of oud, for instance, was present at the court of Louis XIV in Versailles. As the belief spread that disease was carried by water, bathing was avoided; imposing odors had to be masked, and the king had his garments soaked in rosewater whose petals had first been boiled in oud-infused water. The recent exhibition on Leonardo da Vinci and perfumes held at the Clos Lucé highlighted oud as one of the central materials of Italian Renaissance perfumery-an ingredient Leonardo placed at the core of some of his formulas.

There is evidence of the trade and use of oud in 19th-century Europe, still under the name aloeswood. At the Tillequin Museum-a true conservatory of materia medica-numerous 19th-century samples of oud wood from Cochinchina can be found, testifying to persistent exchanges with producing countries of Southeast Asia. Aloeswood also features in period perfumery texts, such as the work of English chemist-perfumer Septimus Piesse, who in his 1865 The Chemistry of Fragrances gives a recipe for aloeswood essence: mixing, in 96% alcohol, a large proportion of aloes oil with vanilla, orris, rose, and tuberose.

In the early 2000s, oud experienced a true moment of glory in Western perfumery. This recent chapter is generally traced to M7-a men’s fragrance launched by Tom Ford for Dior, created by Alberto Morillas and Jacques Cavallier. Yet oud had already begun to be felt, discreetly, in the early 1990s with Balenciaga pour Homme-but still unknown to the public, oud was not even listed among the notes. The popularity of this mysterious material only grew: in 1994 two oud-containing perfumes were launched; by 2004 there were nine; and in 2012 as many as 110 fragrances claimed the precious ingredient. However, the vast majority of these European creations contain not a single drop of real oud. Oud is either evoked via a reconstruction using various naturals, or replaced by a synthetic oud that cannot fully reproduce the depth of natural oud. Omnipresent on bottles and in marketing, oud thus remains largely misunderstood in Europe. The feeling of “too much oud” is an illusion-and there is still much to explore with oud in perfumery to carry forward the material’s millennia-old, universal story.