Oud SQ: Terengganu 30ml Pure Parfum

Oud SQ: Terengganu Pure Parfum 30ml

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.

Why specifically Terengganu oud?

If you’ve followed the Sultani scene, you’d have noticed that the most coveted and popular Sultani profile is vintage Myitkyina, on which the previous Oud SQ was built.

But what you likely would not have known about at all is an extremely rare stash of West Malaysian oud. That’s because what you have here is the Sultan’s private distillation of it, which is less known about and more limited than even the rarest Myitkyina.

Not only that, this is also one of the earliest distillations from the region in oud history. As you may know, Indo-Malay oud distillation only began to pick up in the early 1990s, and this oud dates right back to the cusp of that incredible period.

That was a time that gave you access to the finest, most mature wild aquilarias anybody would ever again find. And, instead of selling the raw wood as everybody soon started to do, you actually had the chance to transmute those majestic giants into drops of olfactory bliss. Soulful wafts of the most resinous malaccensis of the sinking sort which elicit an exquisite floral tone that’s as if the creamiest floral bouquet baptized in the oud’s legendary herbaceous blue purple.

Oud SQ is that Terengganu profile, in spray format, decked with silver bells and golden whistles, to create not only the most accurate perfume rendition of this legendary oud profile, but to impregnate the brew with EO’s signature DNA.

Again, if you’re reading this, I assume I don’t have to explain the difference between the Sultan’s private estate ouds and the ones that are ‘from the Sultan.’ I also don’t have to highlight that by “Terengganu profile” I’m referring to one of the most acclaimed ouds ever: Oud Sultani, 2001…

And I certainly don’t have to re-iterate that you’ve got about as much luck distilling sinking-grade Terengganu oud today as you would finding a time portal back to 1985 to distill the sinking T that’s in this brew.

Because it’s such an historic distillation, pinpointing the origin would elude the greatest veterans and experts, especially because Terengganu oud has always been a luxury to smell, even during the golden days of oud. So, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to find even seasoned distillers who have not had the chance to smell it. How many have you smelled?

While the Myitkhina that defined the previous edition of Oud SQ could have been mistaken for an old Pahang distillation, the now-gone resin-crammed sinking Terengganu agarwood that birthed this oud shoots straight through your nose.

If you’ve smelled the likes of Oud Ahmad, you’d know how Kelantan’s darker, wetter jungle herbal tone departs from the purple-blue floral beauty of the finest Terengganu. If you’re lucky enough to own OS 2001, you’re in for a reunion where the tantalizing oud is decorated with saffron-laced myrrh cracking through tobacco leaves, all filtered through a tantalizing treacle of castoreum and plum.

TOP · Clove · Cubeb · Rosewood

HEART · Vintage Terengganu Oud · Rose Absolute

BASE · Cambodian Oud Resin · Castoreum · Tobacco