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Picture by Phương Huy |
If I could sit down with Manuel Cross, the founder and "self-taught" perfumer of Rogue Perfumery, I'd want a conversation about what kind of perfume is "unwearable." He, and likely other perfumers of his ilk, would want to steer the topic towards the "where," and that satisfies one element, but I would fight for the "why?" Surely, in all things perfume, there must be a philosophical underpinning to every serious scent. I'm wondering why in the holy hell anyone would want to wear A'Oud Ancienne? What is the philosophy here?
As with stuff like Pineward's Treacle and YSL's Kouros, I get it. Men enjoy animalic fragrances. I'm a man, and I like a good animalic chypre or fougère. But oud is something else entirely. It's a rotted wood, considered a "precious" wood for reasons that elude me, and bears heavy cultural implications in its common application, many of them spiritual in nature. Assam oud, like Chandan incense from the region in India, is ritually burned to cleanse the ethereal aura of a place. Its application in perfumery is widespread (and prized) throughout the Muslim world, and it's not uncommon to find various oud-based compositions in nearly every Muslim-majority Asian country. The most expensive perfume of the last ten years is Shumukh by The Spirit of Dubai, with an asking price of $1.2 million, and guess the first note? Oud. Much of this is for show, but there's another reality here.
A kilo of oud (a kilo being roughly 2 lbs) only yields one milliliter of resinous oil extract, at a rough cost of $250, which makes just one ounce (30 ml) of pure oud resin potentially worth $7,500. This is why small bottles of Arabian oud attars are among the most expensive luxury items in the perfumery sphere. Quality attars are known for opening with brusque barnyard-like animalic essences, rife with notes of filthy hay, intense terpenes, a weirdly camphoraceous mint-like accord, and indolic florals. I've seen twelve milliliter bottles of Indian attars priced at around $15k. If you're a billionaire sheik staying at an ultra-luxury hotel in Dubai, and you happen to shop at the famous mall there, dropping this kind of coin on a vial of something that looks like bourbon-barrel maple syrup is nothing to you.
For the rest of us, it's a mystery. What works with A'Oud Ancienne is that it smells of some quality agarwood, at least in the first two minutes of wear. Once the initial fecal pop dissipates, a synthetic "black" oud that has been popular with niche brands for years steps up and lends AA a rather chemical-inky vibe for the rest of the day. It is accented with labdanum and synthetic castoreum, and buttressed by a little bit of pine on top and quality oakmoss below, so the overall material quality of the composition is quite high, which it should be at Manuel's prices. But AA is unwearable in polite company, and I struggle to understand why anyone in the West would spend real money on a bottle of something that will make his friends run for the hills. Longevity is nuclear: expect fifteen hours.