Oud SQ: Terengganu

Oud defines every crevice of the fragrance. Every top note is filtered through Vintage Oud and shoots out the other end to meet you mid-air dripping with tears of Black Resin. Cubeba Pepper and Rosewood dart through thick purple-red clouds of resin rain. The Rose absolute (as opposed to otto – for its deep red, headier profile) in the heart has been reddened, drenched in Oud.

Copious pourings of Oud right into the composition. Plus Raw Agarwood inside your bottle. Plus a shot of in-house raw Oud Resin in the carrier. And, if that wasn’t Oudy enough for you, a splash of Oud Hydrosol along with the Resin to mend the brew the way only Oud would.

The handsome Clove-tinged Tobacco in the base, too, only serves to sweeten the thick foundation of Oud that stands after all the hours.

I can chant “oud” all day all night – but what kind of oud, exactly, are we talking about here?

If you’re reading this, I assume I don’t have to bother unpacking the gibberish that is marketed as ‘oud’ in all those so-called mainstream oud perfumes.

In the ‘artisanal’ sphere, people think they can buy a 3gr bottle of EO oud and launch an entire perfume line based on that… while they’re conveniently silent on how much oud is actually in your bottle.

Likewise with even niche ‘oud’ perfumes that contain only a smidgen of skanky cheap oud.

To create an EO perfume doesn’t just mean you pick up a tola of oud and then weave a story around that. Instead, it takes investing hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time in order to secure the caliber oud we use. Oud, almost all of which will be dunked into your EO perfume.

This involves tiresome trips to the countries the ouds we talk about are distilled, where we distill them. Sometimes we invest in a distillation we only plan to use perhaps two, three, or five years later. Sometimes an oud is so precious you have doubts about using it at all.

This is not to boast or put anyone down but to illustrate that there are oud perfumes and then there’s OUD perfume. We wouldn’t incur such expenses or go through such logistical acrobatics (right now we’re in the Far East waiting to hear back from CITES for details about getting our oud back to the atelier) if the end result you smell wasn’t palpably notches above anything else.

So, I wonder sometimes if it ‘clicks’ in frag lovers’ minds. That at EO you don’t just get any oud. That the oud in this perfume is the only one of its kind.

But it’s not even about the sheer rarity of the magic T in this spray but all about the sensual, blue purple bubbles that pop to let your Oud-addicted nostrils feast on what is an accentuated soliflore oozing out vintage Teregganu oud.