Getting My Scent of the Gulf: Why Oud has become more precious than gold To Work

"For us, remember, it's not just a scent. It's an entire culture. It's something we can't truly discuss to outsiders." The assistant lit a madkhan (a small portable incense burner) with a couple of agarwood chips in it, and quickly the aromatic smoke had actually filled the shop. "See?" Ajmal said. "It's the extremely scent of the Muslim culture, in a method.

It offers us all type of emotions, memories." He included that in a culture in which nearly all guys use white and all women wear black, perfume was a method of expressing design and character. Ajmal told me that the oud business was flourishing. Did I understand that there were now nonstop flights in between Assam and Bangkok because of the oud trade? "My father used to say that the genuine wild wood is impossible to find nowadays.

"Yet the costs have soared. They call it black gold." A kilo of wild Indian wood can now go for 200,000 dirhamsabout $54,000. ( see page is someplace around 30,000 dirhams, or $8,000.) Ajmal sells wood chips, oil, and fragrances made with oud and other ingredients, such as jasmine and rose.

I sprayed some on myself and rubbed it into my skin. Instantly a powerful, musky scent rose from my wrist. It had none of the innocuous, pretty, floral smell of the average Western aroma. This was earthy, sexual, and brooding, and I resolved at once to wear it whenever I attempted to be noticed.

Our womens oud perfume - Nordstrom Diaries

"Camel piss?" he asked. "Can you smell that? That's something some people state oud reminds them of. But it's actually an entire world of olfactory intricacy. There's nothing else like it in the natural world." He said that Western perfumers choose to produce a sphere of aroma around the wearer.

Users desire their scent to be observed by all individuals in their olfactory wake. Americans, by contrast, hate wearing anything that smells too strong. "For us, perfume is a mark of status. We can smell even at 50 feet the distinction in between authentic top quality oud and the inexpensive artificial things being made in laboratories," Ajmal stated.