Oud is the scent of a tree defending itself. A great many perfumes sold under the name contain little or none of the natural material.

Most people meet oud in a department store or an airport. It is on the label of a black bottle, usually with the word "intense" or "noir" beside it, and it smells dark, sweet and heavy. A lot of people decide at that point that they do not like oud.

We think that is a fair reaction to what they smelled. But in many cases what they smelled was not natural oud at all. It was an oud accord. This post explains what the real material is, why so little of it reaches a bottle, and why we put it in a perfume named for an oakwood in Aberdeenshire.

What oud is

Oud comes from Aquilaria, a genus of trees native from Assam and southern China through Southeast Asia to New Guinea. The word is Arabic and means wood. In English the material is usually called agarwood.

A healthy Aquilaria tree is not much use to a perfumer. Its wood is pale, light and has almost no smell. Nothing much happens until the tree is stressed. A branch breaks, an insect bores into the trunk, or the wood is wounded some other way, and microbes, often fungi, may move into the damaged tissue.

The tree responds by flooding the wood around the wound with a dark resin. Over years the infected heartwood turns from pale to nearly black and becomes heavy enough, in the best pieces, to sink in water. That resin is the smell. Oud is the tree's defence, and it stays in the wood long after the tree is felled.

Researchers still argue about the details. Older accounts name one mould as the cause. More recent work has found many fungi in agarwood and suggests the wound matters as much as whichever fungus arrives. What nobody disputes is that an undamaged tree makes none.

In the wild this is uncommon. A commonly quoted estimate is that only about one wild tree in ten develops agarwood naturally, and you cannot tell which from the outside. For a long time the answer was to fell trees and split them open to look.

Overharvesting became serious enough that Aquilaria malaccensis was placed in CITES Appendix II in 1995. The protection was extended to all Aquilaria species in 2004 and took effect in 2005, so international trade in agarwood is regulated. Much commercial agarwood now comes from plantations, where growers deliberately wound or inoculate the trees to bring on the resin.

Why so much oud is not oud

Oud oil is distilled from that resinous wood. A great deal of wood gives very little oil, the good wood is scarce, and the result is one of the most expensive raw materials a perfumer can buy.

That price is hard to square with a fragrance sold in every airport in the world. When oud became fashionable in Western perfumery in the 2000s, many houses did what perfumery usually does with a scarce material and built an impression of it. An "oud accord" is a constructed blend of other materials designed to suggest agarwood, and it may be largely or entirely synthetic. Formulas are not published, so nobody outside can count, but a perfume with oud in its name may contain only a trace of agarwood, or none.

We are not against this. Plenty of notes are built that way. There is no heather oil, for example, so every heather note in perfumery is a construction, as we explained in the heather post. The trouble is what the oud accord turned into. In Western commercial perfumery it often became louder, sweeter and smoother than the natural material. Then that style was copied across many bottles, until "oud" came to mean something rather different from agarwood.

That smell is what many people now mean by oud. It is thick, sweet and a little chemical, and it does not change much from the first minute to the last. If that is what you dislike, you dislike the accord. You may never have smelled the wood.

What the real thing smells like

Real oud smells of wood before anything else. It is a dry, dense wood smell with a good deal going on underneath: leather, a little smoke, something medicinal, sometimes dried fruit. Oils from some regions also have an animal, farmyard edge that surprises people the first time. It is not a polite smell, and it changes on the skin over several hours.

It also varies a great deal. The species, the growing region, the age and resin content of the wood, and the way it is prepared and distilled all show in the oil. People who collect oud talk about it the way others talk about whisky or tea.

Across the Gulf, oud has long been burned as incense and worn as perfume. It is often combined with other materials central to the region's perfumery, among them rose, saffron, musk, ambergris and warm resins. That style is rich and sweet by design, and at its best it is very good.

Western perfumery borrowed the style and kept mostly the sweetness and the weight. That is the other half of the problem. Even where there is real oud in a bottle, it is usually dressed the same way, so one side of the material is all anyone gets to smell.

An oakwood on Deeside

Dinnet Oakwood is a small wood on the south bank of the Dee, between Aboyne and Ballater. It covers about twenty hectares, which is roughly thirty football pitches. It is mostly oak, with birch taking over at either end and some hazel underneath. The ground is bracken and blaeberry, with wood anemone in spring.

Oakwoods are common in the west of Scotland and scarce in the east, and NatureScot describes this one as among the best examples in the north-east. It may not be ancient. Their own account says the wood could be partly or wholly the result of planting in the early 1800s. Whatever its origin, they say it now has the character of a largely undisturbed, semi-natural northern oakwood.

What matters for a perfume is the aspect. The wood sits on a north-facing slope, between 150 and 200 metres up, so it is shaded and cool. On a damp day the smells are bark, moss, wet leaves and the fungi working through them, and none of those is sweet.

No agarwood tree is native within thousands of miles of Dinnet, and we are not pretending otherwise. The place gave us the frame. We wanted to know what oud smells like when it is set among the smells of a cold northern wood and not among rose and amber.

The answer is that it smells much more like wood. What sits beside a material decides which part of it you notice. Sweet partners bring out the sweetness in oud. Birch smoke, leather and a dry woollen note bring out the timber and the resin. The cold plays a part as well. Lower temperatures slow evaporation, so a perfume sits closer to the skin, and that restraint suited what we were trying to do.

Why it is called Doric

Doric is the Scots of the north-east: Aberdeenshire, Banff, Buchan, Moray and Aberdeen itself, the Granite City, about thirty-five miles down the Dee from Dinnet. It is the dialect in which "what" becomes "fit" and "where" becomes "far", a boy is a loon and a girl is a quine. The usual greeting is "Fit like?" and the usual answer is "Nae bad."

The name comes from Doric Greek. In later European literary tradition Doric was set against the prestigious Greek of Athens, and it came to suggest something rural and plain. In 1721 the poet Allan Ramsay compared his Scots to the Doric of Theocritus, defending it as a proper literary language beside polished English. For a long time "the Doric" meant any Scots. Over the last century the north-east has kept the name for itself.

That is why the perfume is called Doric Oud. In Scotland the word means the north-east, and Dinnet Oakwood is in the north-east. The name says where the oud has been put.

What is in Doric Oud

Doric Oud has four notes: tweed, birchwood smoke, aged leather and oud. The oud is from Vietnam.

It opens with the tweed and the smoke, which is a dry, slightly rough smell, like a wool jacket that has been near a fire. The leather comes through as it warms on the skin. The oud is underneath from the start and is what remains at the end of the day.

There is no rose in it, no saffron, no amber and no vanilla. Nothing in it was added to make the oud sweeter. It is the warmest and darkest of our seven perfumes, but it is a dry warmth, closer to a wood fire than to a dessert.

If you already like oud, you may find this quieter and woodier than you are used to. If you have always assumed you dislike oud, this is the version we would ask you to try before deciding. Samples are 2 ml and cost £4, and the price comes off a full bottle if you go on to buy one. You can order one in the Discovery Set.