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Attars & CPOs Mukhallats Musk Single note exploration The Attar Guide The Business of Perfume

Musk: Technicalities, Legalities, and Ethicalities

24th November 2021

From here on out, we are going to go material by material, grouped according to the most important scent families for attars, mukhallats, and concentrated perfume oils. Each section will start with a primer on the material or scent family, and end with reviews of oil-based perfumes in that category. That’s right – reviews are upcoming! I bet you thought we would all need a walking cane by the time I got there.

Musk is, I suppose, as good a place to start as any, because its use varies so dramatically with the type of oil perfume and the market in which it is positioned. For example, mukhallats that contain real deer musk are enormously popular in the Middle East and among die-hard fans of artisanal perfume oils, but verboten in the American indie oil community. Both the niche perfume oil and mukhallat perfume segments adore fluffy white or Egyptian-style musks that are 100% synthetic. The American indie sector makes full use of a veritable United Colors of Musks, i.e., black, red, green, and pink musks (all synthetic, all with a different aesthetic effect). And Indians love ‘black musk’ attars, which tend to derive their musky effect from a complex range of plant-based materials, such as ambrette seed, herbs, and synthetics, rather than deer musk (although this is possibly more of a scarcity issue than an ethical or legal one).

In this chapter, I am going to talk exclusively about natural (deer) musk. The other types of musks (musk synthetics, musky plant materials, ethical animal musks) can wait until Part 2.

What is musk?

If we speak exclusively about natural musk, then musk is a grainy, aromatic reddish paste formed within the glandular musk sac of the male musk deer. It contains a genetic rundown of his most important attributes from age, health, strength, to overall virility. Basically, natural musk is the Tinder profile of the animal world.

During mating season, the deer urinates onto the musk pod, releasing small amounts of his musk, which then falls or is sprayed onto rocks, trees, and bushes. While in rut, the deer’s urine is dense with male deer hormones, so this mixture of urine and musk is incredibly potent. Fresh musk pods have an ammoniac smell, because of the urine sprayed onto them.

What happens then? The female takes a sniff, examines the profile, and decides whether the description appeals. If all goes to plan, she swipes right and follows the scent to the source. If not, well. It is brutal out there.

Because musk has so much to do with sex and reproduction, there is a common misconception that musk is stored inside the testes, like sperm. Not true! In fact, the musk sac is attached to the abdomen behind the penis, and is separate to the testes. But while the musk sac is not actually a testicle, there is no getting around the fact that it does look awfully like one. Since the word ‘musk’ itself comes from the Persian word moschos and the Sanskrit word muska, both of which mean testicle, it seems that our ancestors were just as confused on this issue.

Musk comes mainly from the musk deer family of deer (Moschidae), of which there are several sub-species, including, for example, Moschus moschiferus, the Siberian musk deer native to China, Siberia, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan, and Moschus leucogaster, the Himalayan musk deer native to Bhutan, India, and Nepal^[i]. Some of the musk deer species are more endangered than others. There are seven main geographical regions where musk deer live, and are therefore hunted, namely: Nepal (the Himalayas), Siberia, China, India, Pakistan, Korea, and Mongolia.

Animal sources of musk other than deer do exist, although technically speaking, the word ‘musk’ exclusively refers to musk from a deer. However, given that most of the world’s population uses the word ‘musk’ to describe anything even vaguely musky in nature, we will not be too pedantic about it here either. Alternative animal musks include that of the muskrat, the musk duck, the musk shrew, the musk lynx, and even some species of crocodiles. In perfumery and medicine, however, only musk from the musk deer is commercially significant because the deer produces the largest volume of aromatic substance and possesses the strongest odor. (Also, have you ever tried holding a crocodile down to get to his musk sac?)

There are few other materials in the world that possess an aroma as complex as musk. But if it is complex from a biological perspective, then you can only begin to imagine how difficult it is to get people to agree on what exactly it smells like. Depending on who you talk to, it can be described as earthy, warm, sweet, powdery, chocolate-like, fecal, urinous, stale, woody, fatty, and so on. This is further complicated by the fact that few people will have smelled the genuine article itself, but rather some aspect of it as recreated through synthetic molecules or botanical musks.

To further complicate things, many people simply use the word ‘musky’ to describe a textural facet of a scent, even if the scent itself does not contain any musk. For example, perfumes that are clean or powdery are often described as musky, even though their laundry-clean scent is a million miles away from the animalic odor of deer musk. Conversely, anything that strikes the nose as dirty or fecal is described as musky almost by default, even if other materials have been used to create that effect, such as indolic jasmine, civet, or castoreum.

In my experience, real deer musk features the following characteristics:

Soft and lingering odor

Subtle, skin-like aroma

Mimics the smells of bodily intimacy, ranging from dried saliva and perineal odors to morning breath

Possesses some petting zoo aspects

Not fecal per se, but a composite picture of soft droppings, urine, hair, fur, etc.

Not generally a loud, booming aroma, unless you are smelling synthetics

Powdery or dusty in texture

Can be sweet to the point of being saccharine

Can be also be ammoniac (think animal urine on hay) with sharp undertones

Incredibly tenacious odor – clings to the hairs inside the nostrils

Individual nuances include cocoa, leather, chocolate, newspaper, paper, dust, plasticky aroma (like old lunch boxes), mold, rising damp, sugar, human skin, intimate smells

Aging plays an important part in how a musk tincture will smell. If old, dry musk pods from vintage stock are being used to make a tincture, the resulting tincture may give off an unpleasantly stale scent. A tincture from young-ish, still moist grains will smell more varied and complex than one made from old grains. However, fresh musk pods take longer to tincture because the grains are still moist and do not give themselves up to extraction as easily as dry grains. Aging the musk pods for about three months before using them is ideal for perfumery purposes.

The liquid in which the grains are tinctured is the second vital component of its final aroma. If the carrier liquid is even slightly perishable, then it is a waste of musk grains, as the mixture will not age well. Tincturing liquids that are fine to use include ethanol and other types of perfumer’s alcohol. The grains can also be macerated, meaning steeped in oil such as moringa oil, and even fractionated coconut oil, but the very best of all is, of course, pure sandalwood oil.

If the musk deer themselves are small, then you might imagine how tiny the musk pod is – about thirty grams. Each sac contains about half as much again in musk paste, so around fifteen grams per animal. Scraping the secretions out with a spoon to spare the animal’s life nets a much smaller amount of musk paste, but the deer at least lives to make another batch.

Deer musk grains. Photo my own.

The musk pods can be dried and used whole (in Chinese medicine) or opened to remove and age or dry the musk paste into musk grains for perfumery and also again for Chinese medicine. On the market, it is possible to buy both the whole pods and the dried grains. When fresh, the musk paste is moist and red-brown in color; when dried, the paste separates into tiny grains the size of nigella seeds, most often dark brown, oxblood, or black in color. If being used in traditional Chinese medicine, a doctor may use the grains whole on patients, or powder them down for use in complex liquid formulae to treat specific ailments.

Most sellers of musk scoop out the moist paste while the pods are fresh and pack all the aromatic material into large jars, measuring out quantities for buyers one at a time. This way of storing the musk grains ensures that they don’t dry out as quickly, which is important because the sellers get a certain price per gram, and the drier the musk grains are, the lighter they also are. Mukhallat makers can either buy the musk pods whole and age them themselves at home or buy the moist musk grains from a seller.

The grim reality of obtaining deer musk

Deer musk is a wondrous material. But let us not beat around the bush here – in most cases, the deer musk is hunted and killed to obtain its musk sac. Poachers first trap the deer in steel deer traps, and then either leave them to die or shoot them. Licensed hunters shoot to kill. It has been described as ‘killing the hen to get the egg’^[ii] and with good reason: one pod per deer and that is it. Nothing renewable about this particular resource.

Alternatives have sprung up to this in the form of deer musk farms in China, the first one being established in 1958. On these farms, the deer do not die but are immobilized (held down or sedated) once or twice a year and have their musk glands scraped out with a special spoon^[iii]. Chinese records suggest that a male deer can be ‘milked for his musk in this manner up to fourteen times^[iv] over the course of its natural life.

It is not death, but on the flip side, it sounds excruciatingly painful and cruel. How strictly is the welfare of the animals monitored? It is a difficult matter to investigate with any degree of thoroughness because outside access to the farms is restricted, and most of the musk grains produced on these farms are consumed within China itself and not made available outside her borders. Given China’s track record on animal welfare, if I were a deer, I think I would prefer to take my chances out in the wild.

JK DeLapp, perfumer of The Rising Phoenix Perfumery, is also a licensed and practicing doctor of TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) in the United States. Because of his contacts in China and in the field (he has worked in many hospitals in China itself), he is able to import deer musk grains directly from these farms, but he is in a tiny minority. When I asked if he could detect any difference in aroma or quality between farmed and wild musk grains, JK replied that ‘there is a difference, but only those with experience would be able to detect it’.

The model for this sort of ‘sustainable deer musk farming’ has not proved reliable, however. Every single one of the Chinese-financed farms in India have failed, for example, demonstrating that musk farming is not a straightforward business. But even if deer musk farms were successful, supply to the perfume industry would likely be a tiny, almost negligible part of the business model. This is because the perfume industry is not the main market for deer musk.

The market for musk

Photo by Bundo Kim on Unsplash

If not the perfume industry, then what is the main market for deer musk?

Strangely enough, it’s medicine.

By far the biggest consumer of deer musk in the world is Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), followed by Ayurvedic medicine (Indian traditional medicine), and then Unani medicine (Greco-Arab medicine practiced in India). The perfume sector lags well behind in terms of both demand and usage. Until 1996, the perfume sector absorbed about fifteen percent of the world’s musk supply, but by 2012, due to CITES and the drying up of legal sources, this had shrunk to ten percent^[v]. Although there are no exact figures for current usage, one must assume that it is smaller still, perhaps closer to five percent.

Quantifying the exact size of the Chinese market is tricky, but if you consider that Traditional Chinese Medicine accounts for about forty percent of all prescriptions in China as well as twenty-two percent of its clinics^[vi], then we are talking about a sizeable chunk of the population of China, which is itself famously, well, sizeable. China and India together absorb at least ninety percent of the world’s available musk.

In the perfume sector, both the demand for, and potential usage of deer musk is extremely limited compared to TCM. If even five percent of China’s 1.371 billion-strong population has an ailment that needs to be treated with musk grains, that is a known market of 68.5 million people. Compare that to the potential pool of people who might want to wear perfume with real deer musk in it, and it is always going to be small potatoes in comparison.

China’s demand for musk is estimated at up to a thousand kilograms per annum^[vii], which translates to the musk sacs of at least a hundred thousand musk deer. But globally there are only about seven hundred thousand musk deer left in the wild. Clearly, domestic musk farming does not and cannot fill that gap. Indeed, the bulk of the world’s deer musk – both legal and illegal – ends up in Hong Kong. Given the supply and demand problem, the sums of money changing hands are huge. In India, musk is valued at four times its weight in gold^[viii]. Raw musk grains can fetch up to US$50,000 per kilogram in Hong Kong, the hub of the international musk market. All musk in these Far Eastern markets is destined for the TCM and Ayurvedic sectors to make remedies and cures for hospitals and clinics.

In the past five years or so, there has been a small but significance resurgence in the demand for real deer musk in artisanal, small-batch perfumery, mostly thanks to the growing fan base around naturals, distillation, and attar making. Bortnikoff, Areej Le Doré and Ensar Oud are artisanal small-batchers who have all released both mukhallats and spray perfumes featuring genuine deer musk since 2016.

However, the commercial perfume sector will never use real deer musk, given both the difficulty of obtaining a cost-effective and legal source for the large quantities of the material necessary to fill perfume formulas on a mass production scale, and the general revulsion among consumers for products that involve animal cruelty.

Is deer musk illegal?

Some is legal; some is not.

Two things determine the legal status of a specific deer musk. First, the level to which its source animal, i.e., sub-species of musk deer, is endangered, and second, the legislation put in place by individual countries regarding the hunting and trade of musk on their territory.

First, let us look at the endangerment angle. There are eight species of musk deer in the Moschidae family, and they are not all equally endangered. CITES has three classes of endangerment, Appendix I, II, and III, and the different sub-species of musk deer are classified into one of those appendices based on the health of their numbers in the wild.

Moschus leucogaster (the Himalayan musk deer) and Moschus cupreus (the Kashmir musk deer), for example, are Appendix I, which means their numbers are nearing extinction levels, and should not under any circumstance be hunted and killed. But Moschus berezovskii (Chinese forest musk deer) and Moschus moschiferus (Siberian musk deer) are Appendix II, which means their numbers are healthier, and, under certain conditions such as the proper licensing programs and permits, can be hunted and their musk traded.

Thus, something like Kashmiri musk is illegal primarily because its source animal is an Appendix I species approaching extinction. Siberian musk is legal partly because its source animal is not nearing extinction.

The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) named musk deer an endangered species in the 1980s^[ix], restricting the trade of deer musk by its 170 signatory countries. In Resolution Conf. 11.5^[x], CITES lists all the relevant musk-producing animals, including the musk deer, and urges all parties ‘to develop alternatives for raw musk in order to reduce demand for natural musk, while encouraging the development of safe and effective techniques for collecting musk from live musk deer.’

In response to the convention, most countries with populations of Appendix I musk deer (species nearing extinction) introduced legislation to ban musk deer hunting outright. India, Mongolia, Korea, and Nepal all responded to the CITES convention with musk deer hunting bans. Signatory countries with populations of less endangered species chose different routes based on individual levels of need and state policy. For example, China, which has an enormous market demand for musk in its traditional medicine sector, banned musk deer hunting in the wild but established government-sponsored musk farms to produce musk legally and without killing the animal.

Russia freely allows the hunting of musk deer within the boundaries of their territory, specifically in Siberia where the Siberian musk deer lives. The Siberian musk deer is not in danger of extinction. Musk grains from Siberia are therefore technically a legal product because they come from legal hunting and from a species listed on Appendix II of the convention, i.e., not threatened with extinction, trade and hunting allowed under the correct licensing systems, etc. Deer hunting in Siberia is reported to be controlled, with hunters applying for licenses in a seasonal lottery that determines what number of deer they can kill. Sometimes they can kill only five deer a season, sometimes twenty. This helps the government keep an eye on overall numbers of the deer population.

In other words, in the murky matter of musk legality, the ‘fruit of the poisoned tree’ argument applies. The legal status of the musk depends on the legal status of the source. If your musk comes from a species of deer that is not in danger of extinction and a country that has legalized the hunting and killing of the musk deer, or that has musk farms, then the musk is perfectly legal.

The converse is also true, of course. If the musk comes from illegal hunting in a country that has banned musk deer hunting, then the musk is a product of a criminal activity and is the proverbial fruit of the poisoned tree.

However, as always when it comes to any lucrative resource, illegality abounds. One of the most common Western misconceptions about deer musk is that the CITES designation of the musk deer as an endangered species put an end to deer hunting, and that the shy little deer are bouncing around happily and uninterrupted in the foothills of the Himalayas. This is simply not true. Musk deer hunting continues apace in most of the regions to which it is native, whether the act is legal or not according to the country’s own laws.

In fact, the musk trade is a good example of what happens when overwhelming demand for a product meets the legal banning of said product – i.e., business as normal, albeit conducted under the dark cover of illegality, smuggling, and general tomfoolery. In most cases, the amount of the banned material for sale on the market even increases. The correlation between banning and black marketeering applies to other materials too. In an interview^[xi] with me for Basenotes, JK DeLapp of The Rising Phoenix Perfumery, noted the same phenomenon in the case of the African civet cat:

‘20 years ago, the public pushed cosmetic companies to stop using civet due to the cruelty involved for the civet cat in the extraction process. Did this improve the conditions of civet harvesting? Quite the opposite. Instead, the ban pushed civet paste prices into freefall and brought the civet farmers to the brink of starvation. Because the prices fell so drastically, the farmers tried to make up for lost income by simply producing more and more civet paste, which in turn meant that the civet cats were put under increased pressure and stress to give up their paste. A lose-lose situation for everyone, and by everyone, I also mean the animal.’

This pattern is largely borne out by the evidence of what happens in countries that have banned musk deer hunting outright. For example, India and Pakistan both have laws banning the killing of the musk deer on their territories, but don’t have the resources to control or stop the hunting of the deer. Likewise, the Mongolian government banned musk deer hunting in 1953, two decades even before the CITES ruling, but illegal hunting has whittled the deer population down to a shocking twenty percent of their 1970 levels^[xii].

In some regions of India, when deer hunters are caught by local government officials or rangers, the musk pods are confiscated and then later sold by the local government. Confiscated musk therefore becomes legal musk that can be bought and sold for profit on the open market – fruit from the poisoned tree washed clean and sent right back out to market! China has a legal source of musk, through their musk farms. And yet the output is nowhere near the level demanded by the market, and so most of the world’s illegal musk still washes up in China.

The ethics of musk

Most people in the West consider deer musk to be ethically problematic, if not downright wrong. Part of this is due to the issues over legality, with most people assuming that all deer musk is illegal and harvested from an animal close to extinction. But the larger issue is that most Western consumers do not tolerate animal cruelty, to the extent of actively avoiding companies that, for example, sell in China where animal testing for cosmetics and perfumes is still mandatory.

To be clear, deer hunting is cruel and unethical when the animals are killed illegally. Poachers are unconcerned about animal suffering and will often leave the deer to die a horrible death in their crude steel traps. They care only about the musk sac and will discard the rest of the body. A musk sac obtained in this manner carries the same stigma of illegality, waste, and animal cruelty associated with ivory.

By corollary, musk farming and legal hunting through license programs yield musk that is more sustainable from an ethical standpoint. In Siberia, the species of deer being hunted is not a species threatened with extinction, and the hunting lottery system means that only a finite number of musk deer are killed in the region each year. During a licensed hunt, the kill is as humane as possible (shooting instead of trapping).

However, for most people, this is beside the point. Whether the musk is legal or not doesn’t really address the issue of the deer being killed or maimed for the sake of his musk pod. A big concern over hunting animals in the wild boils down to the issue of motive – are we hunting for sport or because the animal is useful to us? Statistically speaking, a far greater number of domestic animals such as cows, chickens, and pigs are slaughtered to give us meat and leather. However, this mass killing of animals has been organized so that it takes place far away from the public eye, behind the walls of abattoirs and factories far away from residential areas. It is a different thing altogether when it comes to the thought of Bambi. Most of us just do not have the stomach for it.

Note: This article is a reprint of The Murky Matter of Musk, which was originally published by Basenotes in 2017. I am reproducing it here, with kind permission by Grant Osborne of Basenotes.

About Me: A two-time Jasmine Award winner for excellence in perfume journalism, I write a blog (this one!) and have authored many guides, articles, and interviews for Basenotes. (My day-to-day work is in the scientific research for development world). Thanks to the generosity of friends and acquaintances in the perfume business, I have been privileged enough to smell the raw materials that go into perfumes and learn about the role they play in both Western and Eastern perfumery. Artisans have sent vials of the most precious materials on earth such as ambergris, deer musk, and oud. But I have also spent thousands of my own money, buying oud oils directly from artisans and tons of dodgy (and possibly illegal) stuff on eBay. In the reviews sections, I will always tell you where my sample came from and whether I paid for it or not.

Note on monetization: My blog is not monetized. But if you’d like to support my work or show appreciation for any of the content I put out, you can always buy me a coffee using the little buymeacoffee button. Thank you!

Cover Image: Custom-designed by Jim Morgan.

[i] http://checklist.cites.org/#/en

[ii] http://www.fao.org/docrep/q1093e/q1093e02.htm

[iii] https://www.drugs.com/npp/musk.html

[iv] http://www.fao.org/docrep/q1093e/q1093e03.htm

[v] http://advocacy.britannica.com/blog/advocacy/2012/03/the-musk-deer-of-india/

[vi] http://universitasforum.org/index.php/ojs/article/view/63/242

[vii] http://advocacy.britannica.com/blog/advocacy/2007/10/traditional-chinese-medicine-and-endangered-animals/

[viii] http://www.fao.org/docrep/q1093e/q1093e03.htm

[ix] http://www.chm.bris.ac.uk/motm/muscone/musconeh.htm

[x] https://cites.org/eng/res/11/11-07.php

[xi] http://www.basenotes.net/features/3505-conversations-with-the-artisan-amp-colon-jk-delapp-of-the-rising-phoenix-perfumery

[xii] http://advocacy.britannica.com/blog/advocacy/2012/03/the-musk-deer-of-india/

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Attars & CPOs Mukhallats Musk Single note exploration The Attar Guide

Musk: Perfumery, Profiles, & Ethical Alternatives

24th November 2021

Musk in perfumery

Musk is one of the four great animalic bases of perfumery, the other three being ambergris, civet, and castoreum. When smelled in isolation in their pure state, all four of these animalic materials can be foul to the human nose. However, in dilution, they each produce deep, drawn-out basso fundos of aromatic sound waves ranging from soft leather (castoreum), earth, tobacco, and hay (ambergris), and velvety, warm floral tones (civet) to deep, complex skin-tones (musk).

Animalics are all excellent fixatives, each serving to stabilize the other more volatile notes in a scent and enrich the blend as effectively as a pound of butter added to a dry cake. Their value in perfumery, therefore, is inestimable. But musk is perhaps the most valuable of all the animalics, because not only does it have the deepest fixative powers, but it also adds its own super-complex, warmly-furred, animalic aroma to the totality of the scent. It possesses a consistent ‘roundness’ or ‘fullness’ that distinguishes it from the other animalics.

We are conditioned to love musk in perfume precisely because, more than anything else, it reminds us so strongly of the pheromone-rich smell of the skin of the people we love. Think of the intimate scent of your spouse’s nape after a long day’s work, or the smell of the back of your children’s knees, and that is a smell best encapsulated by musk.

While natural musk may have been used in commercial perfumery at some point – although this is difficult to ascertain – it is certainly not used anymore. Modern commercial perfumery relies on synthetics, botanicals, or humanely-obtained animalic substances such as hyraceum to recreate the scent of a material, i.e., deer musk, no longer in use.

Many might be surprised to learn that there is not much, if any, use of natural deer musk in larger-scale mukhallat perfumery either. By large-scale mukhallat perfumery, I mean the Chanels and Diors of the Middle-Eastern market – massive companies such as Abdul Samad al Qurashi, Ajmal, and Arabian Oud that have branches all over the world and do a brisk trade in attars and oils each year. Although mukhallat perfumery in general uses far greater quantities of rare and costly animalics and botanicals such as oud oil, sandalwood oil, ambergris, and musk than commercial perfumery, a company that sells thousands of tolas of a single formula per year is not small-batch, artisanal production. It is big business.

For these large mukhallat companies, the importance of ensuring a consistent quality of raw material from tola to tola, batch to batch, and so on, is an absolute business necessity and, as a production issue, on a par with the quality control concerns of commercial perfume companies and fragrance labs. Customers will complain vociferously if their tola of Ajmal Deer Musk is not the same as their tola from the year before. Therefore, while these companies might use some raw deer musk in their musky attars, batch consistency and supply issues make it necessary for them to stretch out the natural musk through use of other musky-smelling materials such as ambrette seed, ethical animal musks like hyraceum, and a wide variety of musk synthetics such as Tonquitone.

This will not come as a shock to anyone with a bit of common sense. Most people know that many, if not most, of the oud oils being sold as pure on the Arabian market in the UAE and elsewhere have been adulterated and stretched out with fillers, vetiver oil, saffron, ambrette, other expensive botanicals, and complex synthetics. Musk is, in many ways, equivalent to oud.

The only sector of perfumery that still uses natural deer musk is the small-batch, artisanal one. Even within that sector, opinions on its use differ. For example, Areej Le Doré and Bortnikoff both use natural musk in their mukhallats. But Sultan Pasha does not (he uses an ethical, botanical-based formula as an alternative).

The point is, if any artisan attar maker or small match perfumer wanted to work with deer musk, then they are really the only ones in the broader perfumery landscape that can. The smaller an artisan perfume operation, the more feasible it is for them to work with natural musk, mostly because of the tiny volumes involved. Working with the crumbs from the rich man’s table of TCM and Ayurvedic medicine works for small artisanal perfumers, because they only make perfume in small quantities anyway.

However, cultural factors also play a role. There is a larger and more culturally-acceptable appetite for deer musk and other natural animal products in the Middle East. Accordingly, Middle- and Far East-based mukhallat artisans have a far easier job selling deer musk-based mukhallats to their audience than their Western-based counterparts.

Is there such thing as terroir in natural musk?

Samples of deer musk tinctures, macerations, and mukhallats. Photo my own.

The short answer is no, not really.

Deer musk can vary in aroma depending on age, and the liquid in which it has been tinctured. However, musk does not vary as widely according to terroir as oud or sandalwood, both of which display significant variances in aroma depending on the soil, climate, and sub-species of the trees involved. With musk, species and micro-climate (terroir) have a far more limited effect on final aroma, with aging and tincturing liquid being more significant factors.

In other words, if you have the genuine article, then there will always be a familiar odor profile and texture that links one musk to another. Musk is musk is musk. Small differences do appear, of course, based on age or nature of the specimen. But it is more accurate to talk about profiles in musk, rather than terroir.

Profiles in Musk

Although personal experience based on a few random samples can never be extrapolated to represent the entirety of such a complex-smelling material, below are my impressions of different deer musk samples I have collected.

Tibetan musk grains. Photo my own.

Tibetan Musk

Material: musk grains

Source: JK DeLapp of Rising Phoenix Perfumery

Appearance: miniscule, reddish-brown dust particles, like the detritus from rolling cigarettes

The smell is rich but light; not overpowering. It smells dirty in an almost uncomfortably intimate way, like the smell of tooth floss after a long overdue flossing session, in other words, a bit stale, saliva-ish, and carrying with it the lingering aroma of tooth decay, halitosis, and degraded molecules of food. However, the smell is not exactly unpleasant. It is simply intimate. If you can tolerate and even appreciate the scent of a loved one’s dried up sleep drool on the pillow beside you, then this will seem familiar and maybe even comforting to you.

Siberian Musk

Material: musk grains

Source: JK DeLapp of Rising Phoenix Perfumery

Appearance: reddish-brown small particles, larger and more prone to clumping together than the Tibetan musk grains

The smell is sweet and high-toned, pitched at a much higher decibel than the Tibetan musk, with leathery and herbal facets. It is immediately pleasant to the nose, unlike the Tibetan musk grains described above. It smells animalic only in a clean and non-jarring manner, like the flank of a slightly sweaty horse in a stable with fresh straw on the ground. It is warm, intimate, and clinging. When the nose draws away from the bottle of grains, the trail in the air reads as slightly powdery.

Siberian musk grains. Photo my own.

Material: Siberian musk macerated in sandalwood oil

Source: Mellifluence

Appearance: deep reddish-brown liquid, viscous, oily

The scent is immediately super sweet, like powdered sugar mixed with hot chocolate drinking powder and pancake syrup. It is also a little herbal, as if there is patchouli or lavender in the mix somewhere. At this stage, this sample reminds me of the powdery Darbar attars you can get from Nemat and numerous other sources on the Internet. Darbar attars are thick, dark, sweet musky attars made from mostly patchouli oils mixed with musk synthetics, henna, and carrier oils. However, once these topnotes die down, the scent is authentically musky, with a pungent, thick aroma that smells quite dirty, although not quite fecal – more like freshly-turned soil and the heavy morning breath of a loved one.

Material: Siberian musk tincture at ten percent dilution

Source: Mellifluence

Appearance: light straw color, completely liquid

The topnotes are pure tincturing alcohol, but then a subtle, soft odor of musk appears. This manifests as a translucent wash of aroma that smells like a clean, warm animal after a day out in the sun. The odor is sweet, soft, powdery, and lingering. In terms of weight, it is very light and sheer.

Material: Siberian musk tincture

Source: Russian Adam of FeelOud and Areej le Doré

Appearance: urine yellow, with small musk grain particles still visible on the glass of the vial when tipped over

Immediately, the scent here is much less sweet than the other samples, and has a deep, musky leather facet that is very appealing. It is more animalic than the other samples, in the sense that it actually smells like it is been scraped off the behind of an animal. But the scent is in no way dirty, unpleasant, or fecal: it simply smells authentically of animal origin. It is an extremely warm, deep aroma, with a strong note of leather, specifically leather saddles or reins that have been resting on a horse.

There is a certain dustiness lurking underneath the leather, but it is not excessively powdery, and although there is some natural sweetness, it leans more towards neutral-salty on the flavor wheel. It is just soft, musky leather. A pleasure to smell. It lingers in the nostrils for quite a while, eventually displaying some papery ‘stale cocoa’ tones. In overall aroma, this particular musk is closest in profile to the smell of the Siberian musk grains from The Rising Phoenix Perfumery.

Material: Siberian musk tincture at five percent dilution, one year old

Source: Josh Lobb of Slumberhouse

Appearance: pale straw, liquid

Josh Lobb obtains legal Siberian musk grains from a gentleman in Siberia who sets aside a small amount of grains from his hunting quota each year for him: he then chops the already tiny grains up into smaller pieces and tinctures them in perfumer’s alcohol and rests it for a year. This method seems to intensify the aroma of the finished tincture, because this sample was the most densely fragrant out of all the samples.

The aroma is pungent, warm, and once the brief hit of alcohol dissipates, possessed of a strong ammoniac or petting zoo aroma with undertones of hay and animal urine. However, the scent is in no way unpleasant or sharp. The aromas smell natural and rustic, wrapped in a thick, wool-like texture that is very comforting, like getting a bear hug from a llama. Compared to the other samples, this tincture smells more nuanced and perfumey, and I found myself thinking of Muscs Khoublai Khan, or at least one specific part of it, namely its grimy, sensual, male ‘wool’ facet. Other notes I pick up on include chocolate, damp paper, and dust. The density of scent slackens off quite quickly after ten minutes, or else my nose simply stops smelling it as acutely past that point. What remains on the skin is the dusty, sweet smell of newspapers doused in a layer of powdered sugar. Strangely enough, I also pick up hints of something herbal and fresh.

Kashmiri (Kasturi) Musk

Kashmiri musk is the rarest and most highly prized of the musk, because of its bright, uplifting, and intoxicating properties. But genuine Kashmiri musk, also known as Kasturi, is illegal. Not only does it come from a species of deer listed as being in danger of extinction by CITES (category I), but it also comes from a region (the mountainous parts of Northern India and Pakistan), countries that have made deer musk hunting illegal. The penalty for being caught with Kashmiri musk in Pakistan, for example, is five years in prison. However, I have been able to collect two samples for the purposes of research.

Material: Kashmiri musk from private collection, ten percent

Source: Duftkumpels, Germany

Appearance: yellow, oily, with visible musk grain particles clinging to the inside of the vial

Although Shafqat himself calls this a tincture, it is in fact a maceration of musk grains in a very fine Indian santalum album oil (possibly Mysore). The maceration has a concentration of 10%, which is very concentrated. First and foremost, the quality of the sandalwood oil used here is stunning and almost overshadows the delicacy of the musk. But the musk is there, bright and airy, even a little pungent, revealed when you perform a sort of hide-and-seek with your own arm (take your nose away, smell something else, return nose to arm, etc.). Despite the fame of Kashmiri musk, I cannot say that it is superior or inferior to any other type of musk. However, when the sandalwood is so sublime and dominating proceedings anyway, it seems a pity to use an illegal musk from an endangered species when you could just as well use Siberian musk.

Material: Kashmiri deer musk, two-point-five percent, in Australian sandalwood oil

Source: Mellifluence

Appearance: viscous orange-yellow oil

At first, the overriding smell is of the Australian sandalwood oil (s. spicatum), characterized by a raw, harsh wood solvent smell with facets of pine, eucalyptus, and menthol or camphor, and a texture like sour milk. The pungency of the wood oil makes it difficult to discern anything of the more delicate musk, and this problem persists for a good twenty minutes. Aging is probably a factor here: the aroma molecules feel young and raw, as if brushed with a steel wire brush. Eventually, an aroma of bright, plasticky musk hits the nose, although it is not strong enough to burn right through the pungent layer of sandalwood. This one probably needs time to reveal the delicate nuances of the musk more clearly. It might be interesting for readers to note that the very same Kashmiri musk grains were used in both these samples, but the medium of the solvent (sandalwood oil versus ethanol) and treatment by two different attar makers rendered two very different results.

Himalayan Musk

Material: 20-year-old Himalayan musk maceration

Source: Mellifluence

Appearance: oxblood, almost black in color, viscous texture

The aroma is dark and pungent but also smooth. It initially presents like a locker room full of sweaty rugby players, with a side of billy goat. There is a distinct ammoniac edge to the aroma, like dried animal urine and sweat mixed together, or a stable floor packed a foot high with compacted fecal waste and straw. If you have ever mucked out a stable that hadn’t been cleaned in quite a while, then this smell will be familiar to you. The smell is not unpleasant – not to my nose at least. But as always, tolerance of ‘dirty’ smells depend on individual exposure to animals or farming in childhood. On the skin, it remains dark and pungent, but reveals a surprisingly complex range of notes such as rubber tubing, smoke, fuel, stables, and animal hair. And it does smell rather like a petting zoo. But I like that. It is the only sample I tried that smelled like animal fur.

Other types of musks

Deer musk is not the only substance that gives a perfume a musky smell, of course. The main alternatives are: (i) cruelty-free, ethical animal musks, (ii) botanical or plant-derived musks, and (iii) synthetic musks. All three are used extensively in attar and mukhallat perfumery.

Ethical animal musks

Many attar makers make use of hyraceum, which is the petrified urine and fecal matter of the Cape hyrax found on rocks. Because hyraceum is harvested without any cruelty to the animal itself and possesses a rich, animalic odor that shares some similarity with castoreum and civet, perfume makers are increasingly using it to stand in for animalics, including deer musk. To my nose, hyraceum is more leathery and high-pitched in aroma than deer musk.

Mink musk, rat musk, and skunk musk are also being examined for experimental use in attar perfumery as stand-ins for deer musk. One of the Sultan Pasha attars, for example, experiments with skunk musk. These types of animal musks are also harvested in a cruelty-free, sustainable manner.

Musk of botanical origin

Certain botanical materials give off a musky scent or texture and can therefore be used as a substitute for deer musk in mukhallats and attars. These include ambrette seed, muskwood (olearia argophylla), angelica, and muskflower (mimulus moschatus). Out of these, ambrette seed oil, extracted from the musk mallow plant native to India, is perhaps the best known and most highly regarded. Ambrette lends a scent a fresh, woody muskiness that can smell alternatively like green apple peel, pear schnapps, cumin, and freshly-baked bread.

Wonderfully complex and full-smelling, ambrette seed is unfortunately quite expensive and is therefore now only used in attars where cost is no issue. Thankfully, there exists a synthetic replacement for ambrette seed, called ambrettolide, which is inexpensive and smells very good. In the realm of traditional Indian attars, however, natural ambrette oil (mainly the absolute) is the prime musk component used in the more complex attars such as black musk attars, shamama, and amberi (ambery) attars. Not only is the ambrette seed native to India, but it was also always less expensive and difficult to obtain than genuine deer musk, hence its popularity for use in attars that have a musky component.

Musk of synthetic origin

Photo by Karen Maes on Unsplash

Deer musk has always been hugely expensive to obtain. Therefore, as explained by Mandy Aftel in her wonderful book, Fragrant, from the moment people first smelled deer musk, they have been creating synthetics that can replace it. The scent of deer musk is naturally complex, consisting of a wide range of compounds such as acids, phenols, fatty waxes, and alcohols, but by far its most important component is muscone. Muscone makes up two percent of the molecular composition and is the prime source of that inimitably ‘musky’ aroma.

Scientists have successfully isolated individual scent-giving molecules from deer musk and synthesized them in labs. Synthetic musks are subdivided into three categories, as follows: nitro musks, polycyclic musk compounds, and macrocyclic musk compounds. Without going into too much technical detail, it is important to note that nitro musks, which once gave scents such as Chanel No. 5 their slightly sweaty, intimate, and powdery feel, have long been banned due to public health concerns over potential carcinogenic effects. Many people mourn their absence, treasuring vintage versions of their favorite scents for their use of those same nitro musks.

Polycyclic musks are the original ‘white musk’ synthetics that were developed primarily for the laundry detergent segment of the market, because their molecules were large and insoluble enough to have their scent cling to the fibers of clothes even after washing. People loved the smell of their laundry after using these detergents, and soon there was a demand for that type of squeaky clean musk scent in perfume too. Macrocyclic musks are the new generation of white musk molecules that will replace most if not all the polycyclic musks. Most attars and mukhallats on the cheaper, non-artisan side of the scale use synthetic musks in their formulas, unless they are using an expensive botanical musk such as ambrette.

Because deer musk is not used in commercial perfumery anymore and because natural, botanical musks are expensive, the real issue in most of perfumery these days is not really real versus synthetic, but clean versus dirty. The range of synthetic musk molecules is so incredibly diverse that there is a musk to suit practically every preference.

Some people crave laundry-clean musks. This is easy to explain – there are firm cultural and historical associations with smelling clean. For many Americans of the fifties, for example, when these super musk-charged laundry detergents were first introduced, they signaled (literally) a breath of fresh air after the deprivations of the second world war. Puritanism also left a deep mark on a certain (mostly Caucasian, Christian) segments of American society, with many believing that cleanliness is close to Godliness. Cultural conditioning is a tricky area to get into, but it is something that cannot be entirely discounted.

Most flavor and aroma molecule development by the big flavor and fragrance labs in Switzerland and France is destined for the functional sector, i.e., soaps, shampoos, candles, laundry detergents, and household cleaning agents. Naturally, the bulk of research and development budgets are spent on developing aromas that would be considered desirable by most of the population. And what most people want to smell like is clean. So, when our functional products smell more like a spanking fresh pile of laundered cotton and less like the business end of a yak, it makes sense that these ideas (and aroma molecules) have trickled down into personal perfumery too.

White musks in both Western and attar perfumery smell soapy, slightly sharp, powdery, and almost aggressively clean. In other words, not a million miles away from what they smell like in laundry detergent. But variety is the spice of life. The aromachemical and flavor factories of France and Switzerland have produced broad ranges of different polycyclic and macrocyclic musks to suit every level of tolerance, from the ultra-clean Galaxolide (IFF) to the fruity Helvetolide (a Firmenich molecule that smells a little like ambrettolide with a side of green apple) to Muscenone (a Firmenich molecule that is deeply musky and based on natural Muscone present in deer musk) and, finally, the filthy, animal-like Tonquitone (IFF)^[i].

In other words, in modern perfumery, every kink is catered to, ranging from the slightly-grubby-but-still-passing-as-innocent musk and the I-just-showered-using-Irish-Spring musk to the bedded-down-with-goats musk. The same applies, of course, to mukhallat perfumery.

The united colors of musk: red, white, and black

Musks are often marketed as red, white, black, or even green. It would be futile to argue that the colors have no real meaning in the context of perfumery, because, perception-wise, they do. Colors are powerful in terms of the message they convey. But since all these musks are synthetic musks, the only real difference between them is the choice of colorants a perfumer will add to the batch and the variety of spices and other aromatics to vary the scent profile. The colors are mostly there to convey an impression of its essential ‘character’ to its wearer – white for purity, red for lusty, black for danger, and so on.

White musk, as discussed above, is a category of synthetic musk that grew out of the household laundry detergent segment of the market. Because this class of musks was first used in laundry detergent, their sharp, cottony smell has become forever linked to the scent of clean clothes. In mukhallat perfumery, white musks are extremely popular and each seller has their own variation on the theme. White musk mukhallats are often colored with a thick white colorant, giving them a cloudy, opaque appearance – a clever visual trick that helps the brain to subconsciously classify it as clean. White musk attars are often called tahara musks, body musks, or jism musks (jism meaning ‘of the body’). These attars are extremely popular during Eid, when white musk cubes and attars are distributed to visitors to the home. Here, white stands for purity, cleanliness, and the washing away of bodily sins.

Red musks are usually a deep rusty-red color and often contain saffron, cinnamon, or clove to match the spicy red image of the oil. Red musks are not a special variant of natural musk but simply a marketing-driven variation of synthetic musk. What it means to you will be whatever the color red means to you. And as in lipstick and cars, red tends to mean spicy, exotic, or lusty. Red musk is most frequently used in indie oil perfumery, by companies such as BPAL, Alkemia, NAVA, and the like.

In the American indie oil sector, the red musk accord is usually a blend of musk and a dragon’s blood resin note. Rather disappointingly, Dragon’s Blood resin does not come from a dragon but from a variety of plants. It is not very fragrant on its own, so indie oil perfumers make up a mixture of oils to approximate what they think it should smell like – usually a mixture of patchouli, amber, nag champa accords, etc. To my nose, the red musk used in indie oils smells like that too-sweet miasma of greasy Indian cone incense, ‘Christmas apple’ candle oils, and burlap at the arse end of a head shop.

Black musks are often called Kasturi-type musks in order to drive home the point that they are aping the scent of natural musk that comes from the Kasturi or Tonkin deer. Black musks, if made well and in the traditional Indian manner, are highly complex attars in and of themselves, and can contain anything from patchouli and costus root to ambrette seed oil, as well as a potent cocktail of synthetic musks on the dirtier side of the scale, such as Tonquitone or Musk Ketone. An expensive black musk attar made in the traditional manner can be a pleasure to wear. Unfortunately, most of the black musk attars on the market tend to be made almost entirely with synthetics dissolved in cheap dilutants. Prepare to spend more to find a black musk worth wearing. The black color denotes darkness and masculinity, although I find this is contradicted by the fact that many of them also smell like Cherry Coke.

Green musks and pink musks are monikers only rarely used in attar or mukhallat perfumery. They are more commonly seen in scent descriptions for commercial perfumery and some indie oil companies. Green musks will usually feature vetiver or patchouli oils and are perceived as earthy and forest-like (even a little bit ‘witchy’). Pink musks are floral and feminine, with pretty Asian flowers such as cherry blossom and pink lotus. Sometimes, in modern commercial perfumery, soft Egyptian musks such as the Narciso Rodriguez perfumes or the texture of Coco Mademoiselle are described as being ‘pink’.

Egyptian Musk

Egyptian musks differ from the red, white, and black variants by dint of there being a historical, botanical basis for their existence. While nowadays practically all Egyptian musks are made from synthetic white musk, in the times of Ancient Egypt, the recipe was made exclusively from natural materials of botanical origin. Recipes for the original Egyptian musks^[ii] vary but almost always mention ambrette seed oil, kyphi (Egyptian pressed incense, a sort of barkhour made from myrrh, mastic, pine resin, red wine, halmaddi, and honey), frankincense, patchouli, and rose oil. It was the ambrette seed oil that gave the blend its muskiness.

Egyptian-type musks have proved enduringly popular in perfumery and are still much loved today. Although the recipe is now based entirely on a synthetic musk base, they differ from white musks by being generally creamier, sweeter, and more sensually skin-like, thanks to the inclusion of a more complex range of materials mixed into the white musk.

Modern variants of Egyptian musk scents will almost always include a touch of patchouli and rose, although one of my personal favorites features a fruity jasmine note. The musky rose and patchouli pairing has become a popular trope in Western perfumery too and can be seen in everything from Narciso Rodriguez’ Musc for Her and Sarah Jessica Parker’s Lovely to Lady Vengeance by Juliette Has a Gun. The advantage of Egyptian musk over a pure white musk is that it is mimics the smell of skin more than laundry detergent.

Note: This article is a reprint of The Murky Matter of Musk, which was originally published by Basenotes in 2017. I am reproducing it here, with kind permission by Grant Osborne of Basenotes.

Cover Image: Custom-designed by Jim Morgan.

[i] https://hermitageoils.com/product/tonquitone/

[ii] http://oilhealthbenefits.com/egyptian-musk-oil/

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The Attar Guide: Concentrated Perfume Oils (CPOs)

15th November 2021

The final category of oil perfume is that of concentrated perfume oils. You might get to this section and groan. After all, are attars and mukhallats not concentrated perfume oils? The short answer is that while all attars are, by their very nature, concentrated perfume oils, not all concentrated perfume oils are attars. For example, BPAL’s beloved Snake Oil, while most definitely an oil-based perfume, is not an attar. Neither is Sballo by Bruno Acampora, Café Noir by Ava Luxe, Santal 33 perfume oil by Le Labo, Choco Musk by Al Rehab, or meltmyheart by Strangelove NYC. Cheap oil dupes of popular Western fragrances like Aventus or Sauvage are not attars either, even though many people call them that. In other words, while many perfumes come in oil form, it is not the oil format that makes an attar an attar.

Ok, so how do Concentrated Perfume Oils differ from Attars?

First, the intent behind CPOs is substantially different to that of attars. Attars primarily exist to exalt the beauty of certain raw materials and notes, and by doing so, turn the wearer’s thoughts inwards, towards the soul and towards God (or indeed, Nature). In other words, attars evolved as an adjunct to the spiritual life of a person rather than something that makes you feel like Charlize Theron shimmying through the Louvre in a gold dress.

The intent behind concentrated perfume oils, on the other hand, is artistic rather than spiritual or exalting. They do not exist to help you praise God or pay tribute to precious raw materials. Instead, they exist to spin you a fantasy. They want you to feel like Charlize Theron shimmying through the Louvre in that gold dress. They correspond more closely to the Western idea of perfume – that just happens to be in oil form.

The range of quality and themes in the concentrated perfume oil category is far more diverse than that of attars, mukhallats, or pure ouds. But in general, it is fair to say that someone who seeks out a perfume oil is looking for an effect – a fantasy of how they want to smell – rather than a single-minded essay on one or two raw materials.

For example, if your desire is to smell like a pampered Persian queen, and you have the money, then you can indulge yourself with luxurious perfume oils from high-end niche perfume companies that cost over $250 for a tiny bottle, like Nabucco’s Parfum Fin, or even an oil from Henry Jacques, which start at $500 for fifteen milliliters and climb into the tens of thousands. In this bracket, the quality of the raw materials tends to be as sublime as the artistic result.

On the other hand, if you just want to smell freshly-showered even when you are not, you can pick up a roll-on of Kuumba Made Persian Musk for less than fifteen dollars at Wholefoods while you are queuing to buy cereal. Or perhaps you are a young woman who wants to smell like the library at Hogwarts or a scene out of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, in which case there is a whole back catalog at BPAL for you to explore. Because the nature of desire is as individual as a fingerprint, there is an endless array of perfume oils to match its specificity.

The composition of concentrated perfume oils also differs from that of attars or mukhallats. While attars, ruhs, pure oud oils, and mukhallats involve processes such as distillation, maceration, extraction, blending, and compounding, a concentrated perfume oil is largely composed by mixing a variety of pre-packaged naturals and synthetics together according to a precise formula in a neutral carrier oil. The ratio of naturals to synthetics will depend on budget. At the higher end of the market, with the Henry Jacques and Nabuccos, the content load of natural raw materials is very high, with less synthetic intervention. At the lower end of the scale, the mix is tilted firmly towards the synthetic, with few to no natural materials.

Another key difference between attars and concentrated perfume oils is verisimilitude. While the raw materials used in attars and mukhallats usually smell like the source material, the raw materials referenced in indie or concentrated perfume oils often do not. For example, if an attar contains or references sandalwood, then you will experience something that is close to the aroma of the raw material itself, even if synthetic sandalwood has been used. But in the concentrated oil sector, a sandalwood note is more often a fantasy of sandalwood than something that is faithful to the smell of sandalwood essential oil.

Lastly, there is a difference in the type of exoticism represented in attars and concentrated perfume oils. Attars, ruhs, and mukhallats are an expression of Eastern perfumery, and, as such, use traditional materials used in attar and mukhallat perfumery, such as oud, sandalwood, musk, and ambergris. If they are ‘exotic’, it is simply because they use ingredients perceived to be exotic to our (Western) noses.

In the concentrated perfume oil sector, on the other hand, any notion of exoticism is stage-managed. For example, a concentrated perfume oil might want to recreate a fantasy of what the grave of Ra smells like, meaning configurations of accords designed to conjure up the ‘feel’ of stone, dust, old paper, and kyphi incense. Such a perfume would use a complex formula of synthetics, some naturals, and carrier oils to achieve the fantasy. The result smells exotic purely because the hand of a perfumer steers it in that direction, not because its raw materials or its expression are themselves intrinsically exotic. In short, concentrated perfume oils supply you with half of the fantasy – the rest is up to your imagination.

The Different Types of Concentrated Perfume Oils

High-end niche perfume oils

Photo by Fulvio Ciccolo on Unsplash

The definition of ‘niche’ in perfumery is an ever-shifting target. The term has become largely meaningless in the march of big corporations to gobble up small, independent ‘niche’ brands in the attempt to capture downstream markets. Read my article on this here. However, in the contest of oil-based perfumery, niche can mean anything from a larger niche brand like Le Labo diversifying into the perfume oil niche to capture a different kind of customer to the small, Etsy-based business making products for a tiny corner of the market, with very limited batch production and little to no distribution in retail outlets. At the risk of generalizing, we understand niche as a business model that caters to a long tail of quirks – no matter how obscure – whereas mainstream fragrances are designed to appeal to the taste of a broader audience.

Companies such as Nabucco, Henry Jacques, Bruno Acampora, Fragrance du Bois, Strangelove NYC, Le Labo, Clive Christian, Aroma M, Ava Luxe, April Aromatics, and Olivine belong in the niche category of perfume oils for several reasons. First, limited distribution. Niche oil perfumes are not usually available in retail spaces but must be ordered from online retailers, or in the case of Henry Jacques and Fragrance du Bois, bought in person at one of their exclusive stores. Second, craftsmanship. The quality of artisanship and raw materials in the niche perfume oil segment is considerably higher than, say, the bulk of the American indie oil sector. And despite the common format (oil), niche oils have zero in common with cheapie roll-ons and dupes. Third, diversification. Most of these niche companies also produce perfumes in formats other than oil, and indeed, for companies such as Le Labo and April Aromatics, their perfume oils are simply an extension of their main line of business, i.e., fragrances in eau de parfum or eau de toilette concentration. Thus, for these companies, oil perfumes are themselves a niche within a niche.

A further line of demarcation is artistic focus. Niche perfume companies tend to be tightly focused when it comes to overall theme or brand aesthetics. The Bruno Acampora brand, for example, focuses on a specifically Italian heritage of exquisite raw materials and a certain seventies aesthetic espoused by the (now deceased) Bruno Acampora himself. Aroma M has built up a curated collection of perfumes around the theme of Japan and Japanese forms of poetry, art, incense, and ceremony, because its perfumer, Maria McElroy, is a devoted Japanophile and studied art in Japan for over seven years. Olivine is a brand that has devoted itself to white flowers in all their guises.

Under the lens of such tight thematic focus, these companies do not churn out thirty new releases each year, preferring instead to add slowly to their core collection of perfumes. Brand integrity and aesthetic control are more important to these brands than capitalizing on the hunger for something new and shiny. (Though there is certainly some of that.)

Within the collection of niche oil perfume companies, there are many perfumes that might at first seem attar-like in their single-minded focus on one or two stunning raw materials such as jasmine or musk. But while these perfumes do, like attars, express the beauty of natural flowers, musk, and plants, they do so in a classically Western ‘abstract’ tradition of composing a perfume, which makes them a concentrated perfume oil rather than an attar.

American indie perfume oils

Photo by Artem Maltsev on Unsplash

The world of American indie perfume oils is a specific, self-contained segment of the perfume oil market. Produced in small batches by independent artisan perfumers and self-taught perfumers, mostly in North America, these oil perfumes seek to achieve end results that are largely imagination-driven. They chase a fantasy, such as the smell of a witch’s love spell, Ancient Egypt, or reproduction of the wild, wet greenery of a forest after a rainstorm.

As one might imagine, the perfumes in this segment are far more complex and evolved than in the simpler roll-ons or dupe segments at the lower end of the perfume oil market. Quality-wise, however, they do not measure up to the niche oil segment, either in terms of raw materials or perfumery skills. There is often an amateurish, homemade quality to the perfumes. Brands in the indie perfume oil sector are almost too many to list but names the reader might be familiar with include Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, Alkemia, Possets, NAVA, Solstice Scents, and Sixteen92.

Olivine, Ava Luxe, and Aroma M are also American indie oil brands, but straddle that awkward middle ground between niche and indie. In addition to being more invested in quality and naturalness, these companies also produce non-oil perfumes, such as eau de parfum and parfum-strength sprays.

The prices, quality, and artistry of indie perfume oils vary from company to company. The sole unifying element is a folksy ‘handmade’ approach at odds with the conveyer-belt aesthetics of mainstream, commercial perfumery. It is set apart from other segments of oil perfumery through the use of highly individualized, artistic marketing and bottle imagery, extending to hand-drawn labels, and newsletters for fake towns. The prevailing aesthetic is that of the witchy, gothic, and artsy. Indie oils are also, to a large extent, anti-luxury, preferring the hand-mixed approach to perfume over the high-gloss one of professionals.

Consumers in this segment of oil perfumery tend to be young women who value an individualistic lifestyle over the corporate, mainstream one. Given that the indie perfume makers are often one-person shows, there is often direct communication between the company and its fans, with none of the traditional distance between the perfume house and consumer. If American indie oils vary in quality, their basic construction does not, being mostly a proprietary mix of synthetics and naturals in neutral carrier oil.

Dupes and Roll-Ons

Photo by Yogandha Oils on Unsplash

Lower down the scale, we come to dupes and drugstore roll-ons (roller-balls). Customers in this segment care neither about the naturalness of raw materials nor their ethical status. They care only that a specific effect has been achieved, such as an oil that smells like Tom Ford’s Tuscan Leather at a fraction of the cost, or a drugstore cheapie (Auric, Kuumba Made, Al Rehab) that gives the wearer a quick jasmine or amber fix for the price of a pack of gum.

For every aspirationally-priced niche or designer perfume out there, there exists an oil dupe that costs a fraction of the price. India is particularly adept at producing oil dupes for popular Western perfumes – there is now a sizeable CPO industry in places like Mumbai dedicated to churning out these oils for a couple of hundred rupees a pop. The advantages to dupes are obvious. They cost a few dollars compared to the hundreds of dollars for the real thing, they provide a reasonably close facsimile of the duped fragrance, and they contain no alcohol, making it halal for Muslims and easily exportable across national borders.

However, a dupe will never faithfully reproduce the exact aroma and texture of a more expensive fragrance. For the purposes of this Guide, I procured only dupes for fragrances I myself own either in decant, sample, or full bottle form, because the only valid way to test the accuracy of a dupe is to wear it side by side with the original. I discovered that while many of the dupes can be up to 98% similar to the original fragrance, there is often a vital textural component or depth that is missing.

The thorny issue, of course, is ethics. Since dupes copy another perfumer’s hard work rather than creating something new, they cannot ever really be considered ‘real perfume’. Their mere existence, though an economic reality, shortchanges the work of the original perfumer. But it is difficult to begrudge the existence of a low-cost option in a sea of over-priced fragrances. If I wanted an expensive Western fragrance like Tom Ford’s Oud Wood but was unable or unwilling to pay the hefty price, then Surrati’s Tom Oudh gets me most of the way there for a fraction of the cost. And for most people wanting to smell good on a budget, that is good enough.

Drugstore roll-ons, on the other hand, are not intended to dupe mainstream fragrances (though some do) but to be simply a ‘good smell’ in a handy roll-on tube that you can throw into your bag for a quick picker-upper at some point during the day. In general, the perfume oils in this category are inexpensive, do not have the cachet of attars and mukhallats, come in a rollerball, and often pursue Western perfumery themes such as gourmand or chypre styles. They are also proudly synthetic in construction, unpretentious, and terrific fun to wear. For example, Kuumba Made’s Amber Paste is a smoky-sweet amber that might satisfy a fan of the far more expensive Ambre Sultan by Serge Lutens. Auric Blend’s Egyptian Goddess musk oil is a subtly sexy skin musk that is favored by many celebrities, including Sarah Jessica Parker (indeed, it was part of her inspiration for Lovely).

The question of authenticity

The companies that produce concentrated perfume oils do not usually make any great claims with regards to the naturalness or authenticity of the ingredients of the oils. To be fair, customers are not buying them for that reason anyway. It makes sense, therefore, that concentrated perfume oils are vaunted more for their ability to achieve an artistic effect than the intrinsic qualities of their ingredients.

There are exceptions, of course. High-end perfume oil companies such as Nabucco, Henry Jacques, Strangelove NYC, Aroma M, Olivine, April Aromatics, Fragrance du Bois, and Bruno Acampora place an emphasis on the high quality and naturalness of their raw materials. Their market is slightly different to the market for most concentrated perfume oils, in that the customer for this type of oil is invested in top-notch quality and is prepared to pay the price that entails.

But even within this niche, the abstract goal of the perfume is still the most important factor. Has Bruno Acampora’s Jasmin T conjured up a garden full of heavy jasmine petals turning brown and wilting off the vine and straight onto your lap? Has Aroma M’s Geisha Noire succeeded in making you think of the warm scent of amber resins washed up on a beach on Osaka near to your onsen? If yes, then that means that the creative vision of the artisan who made the perfume oil has succeeded. The customer who buys these high end oils cares more about that creative end game than whether there is actual ambergris or pure jasmine oil in the perfume. The common link between these high-end perfume oils and the rest of the oils in this category is fantasy. The authenticity of the raw materials runs secondary to the fantasy.

In the rest of the market, it is fair to say that the hotter philosophical argument is not between natural and synthetic, but between vegan and non-vegan, ethical and unethical. In the predominantly American indie oil market, for example, customers rarely ask if their oil contains natural raw materials, but they do care about the ingredients being vegan and/or cruelty-free. A natural musk attar or mukhallat, for example, would not sell in the American indie perfume oil segment of the market.

What does vegan mean in the context of a concentrated perfume oil? Quite simply, that the materials used to make the perfume do not derive from an animal. Vegan alternatives to natural raw materials are prioritized in the American indie oil sector. For example, a vegan ambergris note (in other words, Ambroxan) is preferred over natural ambergris. Even beeswax is a problem, with perfumes containing it often red-flagged by the brand owner as fair warning to customers.

Although the word ‘vegan’ has come to be synonymous with ‘superior’ or ‘ethical’ in the indie perfume sector, what it really boils down to is that a lab-created synthetic molecule is being used to replace a more expensive natural raw material such as beeswax or ambergris. This seems to be a trade-off that customers are happy to accept.

The final word

Are concentrated perfume oils inferior to attars or mukhallats? No. They just exist in largely parallel universes to each other. The people who buy concentrated perfume oils are generally not the same people who buy artisanal attars or pure oud oils, and vice versa. Think of them as two circles of perfume lovers on a Venn diagram with little overlap. They have different priorities regarding raw materials, different budgets, and different views on the role fragrance plays in one’s life.

It is always a good thing to explore beyond our boundaries. But be realistic. Manage your expectations. For example, if you are used to attars, do not expect concentrated perfume oils to be 100% faithful to their raw materials. If faithfulness is what is most important to you, then stick to attars and mukhallats, especially the higher-priced ones. But do not be dismissive either. Some concentrated perfume oils summon a far more evocative portrait of a theme than some of the cheaper mukhallats and attars. People crossing over to the indie perfume oil sector from a background of attars and mukhallats might be awestruck at the ability of oils to smell like gingerbread, coffee, or a seascape.

Likewise, if you are turning to attars and mukhallats from a starting position in the indie sector, then you can expect the oils to be much stronger and more intense than you are used to, but also much simpler in structure and less evocative of a specific fantasy. People crossing over into attars from concentrated perfume oils are often surprised to learn what real rose, ambergris, musk, and so on smell like. For some, it can be a shock to the system akin to purging your body of sugar.

Cover Image: Custom-designed by Jim Morgan.

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Attars & CPOs Oud The Attar Guide The Business of Perfume

Foundational Essential Oils: Part 2 (Oud)

12th November 2021

Although I will be doing a much deeper dive on both sandalwood and oud in their respective sections, I wanted to use this chapter and the previous one as an introduction to the two essential oils that are so important to attar and mukhallat perfumery – sandalwood and oud oil. Sandalwood and oud are truly essential oils, in that they are the building blocks of their respective styles of perfumery. In traditional Indian attar perfumery, fragrant materials are distilled directly into sandalwood oil, while in Middle-Eastern mukhallat perfumery, the Arabian passion for oud means that a blend that doesn’t feature it is considered a poor excuse for a perfume. Furthermore, both sandalwood and oud feature such complex aroma profiles that they wear more like a complete perfume than an essential oil.

Oud: The Noble Rot

Photo by Galen Crout on Unsplash

While sandalwood is the most important essential oil for traditional distilled attars, the truly essential oil for mukhallat perfumery is oud. Oud is an oleoresin, a word that literally means ‘oily resin’. The dark, damp oleoresin forms inside the wood of the Aquilaria and Gyrinops species of tree as a response to external trauma – the equivalent of white antibodies in the human body sent to fight infection. The external trauma can be anything, from an infiltration of a fungus through the bark or chemical inoculation by farmers to bug infestations, drilling holes into the bark, burns caused by molten lava, or even strafing by bullets. In other words, oud resin is the tree’s way of defending itself from attack.

Photo of an Aquilaria crassna tree with (darker) oud oleoresin clearly present. The strafing on the trunk was done by poachers to allow an airborne fungus access to the wood, hopefully prompting the tree into producing more of the oleoresin as a response to the ‘attack’. Photo by Blaise Droz,, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2254233

The appearance of the oleoresin is dark brown, greyish, or even black, and clearly distinguishable from the light creamy color of the non-resinated wood. Older resinated specimens such as genuine kyara or incense-grade wood will not display such clear delineation between the oleoresin and the uninfected wood, instead appearing as one piece of wood uniformly threaded with greyish resin.

Oud wood refers to the piece of wood that contains the oleoresin. Resinated oud wood can be heated gently over a burner as incense or carved into prayer beads and other objects. In Arab culture, the smoke from heating oud wood is used to fumigate clothes (both personal and ceremonial robes), houses, and even the hair or beard. The Japanese grind agarwood to powder to use in their world-famous stick incense. The Chinese and the Japanese both have a long tradition of carving precious oud wood into prayer beads and ornaments to be used for ceremonial or religious purposes. The very wealthy may even buy a top quality piece of oud wood (kyara) and display it in a glass case as a showpiece.

Most oud is consumed in oil form, however. Oud oil is the essential oil distilled from resinated oud wood.

Why is oud so important?

No other essential oil in the world is as subject to hysteria, obsessive behavior, collector’s mania, and controversy as oud oil. Its rarity and expense parallels that of Mysore sandalwood oil, and yet, you don’t really find whole Internet communities dedicated to the minutiae of sandalwood oil.

There are several reasons for this. First of all, oud oil is so complex in its aroma profile that it wears as a complete perfume on the skin. Oud oils can have topnotes, a heart, and basenotes, just as in a commercial fragrance. It is therefore the rare essential oil that provides the wearer with a full 360° experience. This marks it out as different from other essential oils such as sambac jasmine or vetiver.

Second, oud oils are exciting because they vary a lot in basic aroma profile from region to region, terroir to terroir, style to style,, and species to species. Therefore, if you don’t like the barnyardy honk of Hindi oud oils, no problem – simply move onto the sweeter, friendlier Cambodi style oud oils, or the super-treacly Trat ouds. Likewise, one might find oneself nerdily consumed with the different types of oils that are distilled from wood grown on the island of Borneo, each with their own little quirks and personalities. There is something in the oud pot for everyone.

Third, oud oils satisfy the eternal human hunger for individuality, rarity, and uniqueness. Oud oils are the perfect riposte to the mass-market, standardized wave of products we consume in our daily lives. Pure oud oils are small-batch and limited edition, full of minute but important nuances never to be replicated with a hundred percent exactitude again. The idea that one can own something a tiny piece of a non-renewable resource is irresistible, especially to those with a keen collector’s mentality.

The final reason why oud oils can be the focus of obsession is that they, unlike other essential oils, allow for a large degree of artisanship and creativity on the part of the distiller. Even minor tweaks to the distillation process can produce surprising variations in the resulting aroma. Therefore, not only is the raw material more intrinsically nuanced than other materials, but its manner of distillation is more open to innovation. The result is still an essential oil, but in experimenting with different distilling materials, mineral content of the water used, cooking temperatures, soaking times, and post-distillation aging, the distiller can arrive at a slightly different result each time.

This ‘room to play’ aspect of oud distilling has resulted in oud oils that display a surprisingly wide range of notes that might not otherwise appear in the oil, such as lilac, chocolate, musk, and even hints of salty, golden ambergris. One oud artisan describes it as alchemy. This aspect of creative experimentation in oud distilling has attracted a greater proportion of artists and artisans to the process, far more than are drawn to either sandalwood or other essential oil distilling.

The Process of Making Oud Oil

The process of distilling oil from resinated wood is very traditional. In many ways, the process is like that of producing a ruh (essential oil) in the old Indian method, namely slow steam distillation using clay, steel, and copper degs. First, the hunters arrive out of the jungle, bearing wood they have chopped out of living trees or felled to access the wood. If the oud wood is from a plantation, the wood is harvested just like any other farmed crop.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is Agarwood.jpg

Uninfected agarwood, i.e., bunkwood. Photo by Hafizmuar at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4782613

The big logs will then be broken down into shards of oud wood and inspected for bunkwood, which is wood in and around the darker, resinated areas of the wood that do not contain any essential oil or resinoid at all (see photo above). If the distillation is a high quality one, then the bunkwood is carefully carved out of the piece of wood and discarded. In lower-quality distillations, the bunkwood is left in to make up the weight needed to pack the distilling pot to capacity.

The remaining wood shards are soaked in water for varying periods of time, but usually for no less than ten days. Longer soaks will ensure that the wood rots a little, adding a sour, fermented note to the resulting oil. This is an effect that consumers of Hindi oils (the Arab market) have come to prize as the principal characteristic of good oud oil. The mineral content of the water used for soaking will impart its own character to the resulting oil, with varying effects coming from carbonated water versus spring water versus tap water, and so on.

After soaking, the still is loaded with about seventy kilos of soaked wood chips and a fire built underneath the still. The oud oil is distilled from the wood over the course of a week, using very exact heat and condensing methods to keep the wood at exactly the right temperature. Steam distillation is the preferred method of extraction because it is easier to keep the heat constant using this method. It is vital not to allow the still to get overheated. The average yield from a seventy kilo distillation is only about twenty to twenty-four grams, which is enough for two tolas of pure oud oil. The yield depends on the species of the wood used, as some species are notoriously low-yielding. The water in which the agarwood has been distilled (called a hydrosol) is valuable to producers because it still contains little particles of oud oil, so the hydrosols are used again and again to wring out the most oud particles possible.

The Scarcity of Oud

Oud is scarce. Less than eight percent of wild Aquilaria and Gyrinops trees contain oud resin. Its scarcity means that it is protected under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). Its status as an endangered species is partly because of the naturally-low infection rate among wild trees and partly because mass deforestation across South-East Asia is mowing down much of the forests, including the agarwood-producing species of tree. Wild oud-bearing trees are facing depletion in much the same manner as Mysore sandalwood. Oud wood from wild trees is rare and costly, leading to high demand, which in turn means that people will spend anything or do anything to get their hands on it.

Although technically it is true that trees are a renewable resource, it takes a lot of time to replace an wild tree that has spent eighty plus years growing that precious oleoresin inside its trunk. Once a wild tree is gone, it is gone for good. Wild agarwood trees are listed as Appendix II in CITES. But as with all Appendix II classifications (including, for example, deer musk), this does not mean that there is a ban on the material itself. It simply means that strict measures are in place to control its trade. James Compton, the South East Asian director for TRAFFIC, clarified this in a press release, by saying: ‘It is important to remember that CITES Appendix II is not a trade ban, but a management intervention that will help ensure legality, promote sustainability and enable more accurate monitoring of the agarwood trade.’^[i]

For many, the best ‘management intervention’ to address the scarcity of wild-crafted oud is plantation cultivation. Plantations are farms that grow Aquilaria species under controlled conditions, with farmers artificially inoculating the tree trunks with fungus to spark them into producing the valuable oud oleoresin. Plantations enable sustainability, continuation of supply, and consistency of product quality – a good thing from the point of view of commercial perfumery.

There is no global shortage of plantation-grown agarwood. Trygve Harris, in her wonderful article, entitled ‘Agarwood – Is It Endangered?’, states that people in Asia are investing in agarwood farming to supply the market and that there is subsequently a healthy number of plantation-grown agarwood trees in Asia^[ii]:

‘Ajmal perfumes estimates that there are 55 million trees planted in Assam, in anticipation of the worldwide shortage. Many of these were planted over 20 years ago. There is a nice plantation of 1.5 million on the Lao plain north of Vietnam, planted in 2000/2001 and now set to become a fishing resort for secondary income. These are mostly, if not all, Aquilaria Crassna. There are 2 million Aquilaria trees planted near Bangkok, and more all over Thailand. One can also find in plenty of trees in Vietnam at the fragrant mountain experimental station in An Giang, not to mention other plantations. Those trees are Aquilaria Crassna. And it seems everyone’s planting them at home, in their yard. All over Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam at least, these trees grow. The world of agarwood does not exist in a separate universe where people have no concept of nature’s limits. In fact, many people have noticed the incredibly high prices agarwood commands and are taking steps to integrate themselves in the future market.’

The CITES effort to regulate and control trade of agarwood has had a big impact in signatory countries where agarwood naturally grows, and some say not for the better. Agarwood grows naturally in Northern India, for example, but strict CITES certification procedures have cut smallholders out of the picture and accidentally allowed corruption to flourish.

Trygve Harris explained the effect of CITES on agarwood production in an interview with me for Basenotes in March 2018 as follows: ‘Basically, it was illegal to harvest an agarwood tree, even from your own property, unless certain steps were taken and rules followed, and the designated places to distill for oil were in cities far away from the towns and villages in NE India where Agarwood happily grows. Agarwood naturally and traditionally grows all over those states, in people’s yards. Trees were harvested for important events, weddings, college, etc. But, with the 2000 regulations, people couldn’t legally sell their own agarwood, unless it had a CITES certificate, which were only obtainable though the official channels at Guwahati and Kanpur. So, a big gap was left, and who better to step in than the mafia? They did, and that’s all I want to say about that.’’”^[iii]

The current production landscape is made up of large-scale plantation farmers who grow agarwood under contract for the big Emirati houses and Western commercial perfume houses, and a second, much smaller group of mostly foreign artisan distillers who run small-batch, custom distillations of oud for their customer base. These two groups of people have very different goals for the oud oil they produce, so it stands to reason that their ways of managing the trees are also different.

Indigenous plantation owners and farmers are under contract to produce the oud oil needed in large-scale perfumery, which includes the big Emirati and Indian brands, as well as Western commercial perfumery[iv]. For these plantation owners, oud is a cash crop like any other. They do not have the financial wherewithal to wait between twenty and forty years for the trees to mature, and many begin harvesting at between six months and three years old. Plantation-grown oleoresin therefore often lacks maturity.

In some regions of SE Asia, but particularly in Laos, farmers use chemical inoculants to stimulate oleoresin production, to speed up the process. Many say that the chemicals leave a metallic dirtiness in the resulting oil. These factors contribute to an oud oil product that is certainly cheap and plentiful, but also inferior-smelling. In contrast, farmers in Assam, in Northern India, rarely use chemical inoculants and allow the trees to be naturally infected by bugs or wounding the trees with knives. Therefore, different countries, different production cultures. Laos produces trees hard and fast, while Assam takes a slower, more rural approach.

Through experimenting with a combination of blending with other oud oils for consistency of smell and force-aging the oils by exposing them to the air to get those traditional barnyardy flavors, the plantations have come up with an oil that can be used in commercial and niche perfumery. The advantages to plantation agarwood are clear – it is cheap, plentiful, and of consistent quality. Depending on the manner of inoculation (chemical versus natural), the age of the wood when harvested, and the quality of the distillation process, oil distilled from plantation agarwood is not always pleasant or suitable for wearing neat on the skin. But blended with other natural ingredients and lifted by synthetics, the effect in a commercial perfume is usually excellent. It also allows for Western perfume houses to make a claim of authenticity for their oud perfumes.

Artisan distillers, in contrast, just want the best-smelling oil possible. They do not care about selling large volumes of oil and intend for the oil to be worn neat on the skin, not mixed into a larger perfume formula. Therefore, they are inclined to buy small quantities of high quality plantation wood whose quality they can control. Artisans usually select only farmed trees that have been growing for between twenty and forty years and buy from farmers who use organic inoculation methods to infect the trees, namely drilling holes in the wood and allowing natural air-borne fungus spores and bugs to enter the wood on their own.

Careful management, selection, and inoculation can yield very good quality plantation oud wood for distilling. The resulting oil can be of a quality that approaches or even matches that of wild oud. In oud terminology, oil distilled from plantation agarwood is called ‘organic oud’, a term that, as in food, is supposed to convey to the customer qualities of purity, cleanliness, naturalness, and the level of care taken during its production.

The Market for Oud

The culture of a country or ethnic group is the strongest influence on how oud is consumed, valued, packaged, used, and sold. Arabs consume the great majority of the Hindi-style oils and wood, for example, while the Chinese consume most wild Cambodi incense-grade wood for carving ceremonial beads and ornaments. The Japanese consume most, if not all, of the incense-grade wood that comes out of the Vietnamese jungles for milling into incense powder for sticks and cones.

In terms of sheer volume, the Arab market is by far the most important consumer of oud. Arabs have used oud oil and oud wood for burning for almost five centuries, an appetite that accelerated sharply with the discovery and exploitation of crude oil in the Emirates region. Oil made many Arabs rich, and this wealth meant that they could now indulge their appetite for a material – oud – that had once been reserved for the Royal families. It is the Arab preference for the smoky, austere, leathery oud oils, i.e., Hindi-type oils, that set the tone for most oud oil production in the Far East.

Hindi-style oud oils were traditionally consumed exclusively by the royal families of the Middle East and the Emirates. Since Hindi oud was so highly valued by the elite, the taste for this style became pervasive in Arab culture. The preference for this style of oud runs so deep, in fact, that if an oil does not possess the traditional Hindi aroma profile, many Arab consumers have trouble recognizing the oil as genuine oud. Clean, green, woody oud oils such as a Borneo or Papuan oil, for example, do not sell well in this market.

The cultural expectation of what oud must smell like plays a huge role in how oud oil is distilled, soaked, mixed, and aged for the Arab market. To cater to the Arab taste, many large companies require that their distillers soak the wood for a longer time before distilling it or expose the oud oil to the air in order to oxidize it and produce an aged, leathery result (called ‘force-aging’). These processes produce a more pronounced, fermented ‘Hindi’ flavor in the oil.

Above all, the enormous Arab appetite for oud oil has had an impact on purity. Yields of pure oud oil are low, averaging at about twenty grams per seventy kilo distillation, which begs the thorny question of how to satisfy huge demand with such tiny amounts of oud. Realistically, something has got to give. And in the case of oud oil, that something is purity. Put bluntly, every single quantity of pure oud oil brought out of the jungles of India and the Far East and into the Emirates is adjusted, stretched out, and diluted with other oud oils, essential oils, and fillers in order to make a quantity large enough to satisfy Arab demand.

And the Arab demand for oud is inexhaustible. The Arab market consumes oud oil and wood not only in their pure form, but also mixed into soaps, detergents, and toothpaste. Therefore, oud is as much a flavoring product to be used in functional cleaning products as lily of the valley or rose is in the West. Oud oil is an essential oil, but its purity is of a lesser concern to Arabs than its essential oudiness. The Arabs prize purity in most all other essential oils such as rose ottos, sandalwood, or Sambac jasmine oil, but regard oud more as a general scent category than as an essential oil.

The Chinese market absorbs almost all the wild, incense grade agarwood from the jungles of Cambodia and Vietnam. Ensar of Ensar Oud reports that it is practically impossible to procure Cambodi oud wood now^[v], since every single log carried out of the jungles have already been bought by the Chinese and at a far higher price that other buyers can afford to pay. The Chinese use some of the oud wood they buy for burning in their temples, but the majority is used to carve beads, ornaments, and necklaces, all of which are assumed to have ceremonial or religious importance.

The Japanese market consumes incense-grade oud wood for use in Japanese incense cones and sticks. The market for oud oil itself is not significant. The huge Japanese incense companies of Baieido, Shoyeido, and Nippon Kodo, among others, consume such large quantities of the highest grades of oud wood (termed incense-grade, Kyara, or Kinam) that they often station representatives outside the edges of jungles to make sure they get first pick from the loads the hunters carry out. In Japan, oud wood is known as jinko or aloeswood.

Once back in Japan, the aloeswood is sorted further into grades, milled to fine powders, and mixed with other powdered woods such as sandalwood and cedar, spices such as clove and cinnamon, and gums and resins (most particularly benzoin). These mixtures are destined for use as molded incense cones or incense sticks, the highest quality of which does not possess a wooden core but burn straight through. Aloeswood is prized in Japanese culture almost uniquely for its role in incense ceremonies, known as Kōdō (香道, or the “Way of Fragrance”). Kōdō involves ‘listening’ to Japanese incense and understanding its spiritual message. The ceremony includes games, a code of conduct, and rituals.

The use of agarwood is historically important in Japan, and dates to the 6th century AD, when fragments of fragrant agarwood were combined with aromatic herbs and woods to perform Kōboku, the act of perfuming one’s robes for religious and stately purposes. Some warriors also used it before battle, and it was an important commodity on the Silk Road. The best pieces (Kyara) were reserved for royal use, and some pieces of Kyara from this period have been preserved in vaults by the government. The price and scarcity of Kyara means that the ceremony of Kōboku is rarely performed today. However, the art of Kōdō continues, with the more expensive aloeswood being mixed with sandalwood, clove, spikenard, and other aromatic spices to produce a wonderfully fragrant incense for burning during the ceremony.

Waiter! Is that an oud in my perfume?

When buying a perfume or oil that has oud in the name, the buyer usually wants to know: is there any real oud in this? It is a reasonable question, especially since any scent or oil marketed as containing oud will likely be more expensive than other, non-oudy options (regardless of whether there is any oud in it). In general, if you are buying a commercial (spray-based perfume), then the likelihood is that the oud will be synthetic. A small number of commercial niche oud perfumes contain real oud oil, but the vast majority does not.

There are two reasons why not. First, there is the problem of replicability. Pure oud oil is one of the most inconsistent materials in the world. Oil batches can smell different from each other even if the same type of wood is used, because of variations in the mineral content of the water used to distill, as well as differing soak times, microclimate, etc. The problem of replicability is not a factor for small-batch artisans such as Ensar Oud, Imperial Oud, and AgarAura, because their unique selling point lies in the interesting variations from oil to the next. But this type of batch inconsistency is a logistical nightmare for commercial perfumery. In commercial perfumery, it is vital to be able to replicate an accord with a hundred percent consistency from one batch to the next.

Photo by Fulvio Ciccolo on Unsplash

Second, there is the problem of scaling up. Real oud oil yields are too small and expensive to make sense in perfume formulas that require greater quantities of each raw material or aromachemical to scale up for production. One twenty gram batch might stretch to fill a formula for two hundred bottles, but it will not be enough to make the ten thousand bottles required to stock the shelves at Sephora or Douglas. In general, small-batch raw materials with huge variances in quality or aroma rarely translate well to large-batch commercial perfumery.

The great issue of oud in commercial perfumery is therefore not that of sustainability but of transparency. If few commercial perfumes contain real oud oil, then why do companies charge more for perfumes with the word oud in them? The simple answer is that oud is an exotic note to which ideas of rarity and expense has been attached. Customers are demonstrably happy to buy into its mystique. It is likely that many consumers believe that the higher prices for scents with an oud note are to cover the cost of obtaining and using real oud in the perfume, although this is rarely, if ever, the case. Many reputable companies obfuscate on this matter and charge much higher prices for the perfumes in their lines that supposedly contain oud.

As mentioned, however, a small number of niche perfume houses do use real oud oil in their formulae, sourced from the plantations of Laos and Thailand. The advantage to Western perfume houses of using plantation oud oil is that it is cheap, pre-blended with other oils to achieve a replicable consistency, and, crucially, available in the quantities needed for commercial perfumery. Brands reputed to use real Laotian, Malaysian, and Thai farmed oud include Mona di Orio (Oudh Osmanthus), Fragrance du Bois (e.g., Oud Violet Intense), Dusita (Oudh Infini), Maison Francis Kurkdijan (Oud Cashmere Mood, Oud Silk Mood, Oud Velvet Mood), and The Different Company (Oud for Love, Oud Shamash). Ex Idolo 33 is a niche perfume that used a stock of 33-year-old Chinese oud oil and might be said to be the only commercially produced perfume to contain an amount of high-quality, vintage wild oil rather than plantation oil.

Higher-end oudy mukhallat sprays produced by the big Emirati and Indian brands such as Ajmal (Shams Oud) and Abdul Samad Al Qurashi (Dahn al Oudh Anteeq) also contain a quantity of real oud, diluted with other oils and perfumer’s alcohol to scale the formula up into a spray-based perfume. In contrast, oudy mukhallats on the lower end of the price scale use the same oud synthetics as everyone else. For a detailed breakdown of what types of perfumes are likely to contain real oud and which are not, please refer to the section in the upcoming Oud chapter titled Challenge 1: Where to Start? This section runs you through all the available options (artisanal oils, big brand oils, oudy mukhallats, Western niche, etc.) and explains the extent to which each option is likely to contain real oud and in what proportions.

Cover Image: Custom-designed by Jim Morgan.

[i] http://www.fao.org/forestry/50057/en/

[ii] http://www.enfleurage.com/pages/Agarwood%252dIs-it-Endangered%3F.html

[iii] http://www.basenotes.net/features/3570-conversations-with-the-artisan-trygve-harris-of-enfleurage

[iv] Fragrance du Bois, for example, is a brand that either owns or contracts exclusively with an agarwood plantation in Malaysia to supply them with oud oil for their line of fragrances.

[v] http://agarwood.ensaroud.com/the-great-cambodian-experiment-3/

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Attars & CPOs Sandalwood The Attar Guide The Business of Perfume

Foundational Essential Oils: Part 1 (Sandalwood)

10th November 2021

Sandalwood and oud are truly essential oils, in that they are the building blocks of their respective styles of perfumery. In traditional Indian attar perfumery, fragrant materials are distilled directly into sandalwood oil, while in Middle-Eastern mukhallat perfumery, the Arabian passion for oud means that a blend that doesn’t feature it is considered a poor excuse for a perfume. Furthermore, both sandalwood and oud feature such complex aroma profiles that they wear more like a complete perfume than an essential oil.

Although I will be doing a much deeper dive on both sandalwood and oud in their respective sections, I wanted to use this chapter and the next as an introduction to the two essential oils that are so important to attar and mukhallat perfumery. First, sandalwood.

Sandalwood: The Elephant in the Room

Photo by Isaac Martin on Unsplash

When we talk about traditional Indian distilled attars, the elephant in the room is the one carved in sandalwood. Sandalwood is a key component of attars because attars are botanicals, woods, and resins distilled directly into sandalwood oil. To be less technical about it, it is at least fifty percent of the magic.

Until a few decades ago, sandalwood oil would have certainly meant Santalum album oil from the Mysore region of India. However, thanks illegal poaching, over-harvesting, and careless disregard for sustainability, the famed Mysore sandalwood oil is now largely unavailable. Supply to the traditional attar making industry has dried to a trickle.

Mysore sandalwood is, or was, one of India’s most precious natural resources. Accordingly, depletion of this resource seems to have caused a national-level paroxysm of anguish. The right to harvest the dwindling number of sacred giants in Mysore is a privilege restricted to individuals or outfits with the proper state licenses, which are difficult to obtain. The totality of the crackdown on sandalwood initially resulted in a spate of illegal harvesting, smuggling, violence, and corruption of government officials, most acutely in Karnataka state – but these issues seem to have abated somewhat in recent years. The consensus seems to be that the sandalwood trade is now quite firmly under the control of the government.

Due to its status as a key national resource, the Indian government has legal ownership rights over all sandalwood trees on the territory of India, even those growing on private land. People often have sandalwood trees growing in their backyard, but if they chop it down to sell or make oil, a quarter of the proceeds must be tithed to the Government^[i].

About Availability

When I say that Mysore sandalwood is no longer available, I should clarify that this does not mean that Mysore oil is not being produced at all. Small-scale harvesting does continue in certain areas of India where it is still allowed, and several large French perfume houses have contracts with private plantations in India to supply oil. However, it is not available in commercially significant quantities, i.e., it is not available in quantities that would satisfy the need of the commercial perfume and attar industry.

In an interview^[ii] with me for Basenotes in 2017, attar maker JK DeLapp explained the issue of availability thus: ‘It is my understanding that 50 or so tons of sandalwood oil are produced in India every year. Not necessarily all from the Mysore region, but they are producing. Global annual demand is closer to 400-600 tons of sandalwood oil, which is why Indian sandalwood is generally not used any longer. From an industry perspective, it “no longer exists”. What that really means is that demand exceeds availability, hence the newer Australian and Hawaiian Sandalwood oils filling in to satisfy demand’.

What this means is that the flow of Mysore sandalwood oil outside of India’s national borders is extremely limited. Whatever is left in the forests of Mysore is controlled by the Indian government, and export of the oil outside of India is technically illegal. Furthermore, India consumes roughly ninety percent of the essential oils and attars it produces, be it kadam, kewra, or sandalwood oil, further staunching the flow of sandalwood outside its borders.

Naturally, the sandalwood supply problem has greatly affected the traditional attar-making sector within India. The flow of oil to domestic attar production has slowed to a trickle, with the rising costs of what oil is still available forcing traditional attar makers to turn to cheaper synthetic solvents (such as IPM), or traditionally less valued wood species such as Australian sandalwood oil (Santalum spicatum). By corollary, the past three decades has seen the number of attar houses in Kannauj fall by nearly 80%. More on that here.

Small amounts of Mysore oil are still available locally through the state-run Cauvery^[iii] Silk Emporium shops in the Karnataka district of Mysore, but unless one is lucky enough to find a trusted local intermediary, this oil is largely inaccessible. It is also not available in the quantities required for attar-making and distillation. Furthermore, the purity and provenance of the oil is difficult to verify. Given the high prices fetched for Mysore oil outside of India and the huge demand for it in perfumery, adulteration is more a probability than a possibility.

Trygve Harris, respected owner of Enfleurage in New York and a distiller of frankincense in Salalah, Oman, confirms this, stating that the oil she tested in 2012 from the Cauvery Silk Emporium had clearly been adulterated. In an interview with me for Basenotes in March 2018, Harris described the oil as follows: ‘It didn’t even try to smell like sandalwood — it was some floral-ish perfume. It was hideous, the product of an ill-employed bureaucrat who imagines it is what tourists want to smell. And there was only 7 ml in the bottle as well. Really disappointing. It was an outrage, actually’^[iv].

Is it Mysore sandalwood or Santalum album that is rare?

Here is the good news. While real Mysore sandalwood oil from vintage, well-aged stock is a rarity, its species – Santalum album – is not. Santalum album is the species of the sandalwood tree traditionally grown in Mysore, but it can also grow (and thrive) in regions other than Mysore, where climate conditions are optimal. These places include Indonesia, Tamil Nadu (Southern India), and Northern Australia. Naturally, when the santalum album species of tree is grown in an area or country other than the Mysore region, it is not technically Mysore sandalwood. It is, however, still santalum album.

A positive thing to have emerged from the current scarcity of, and restrictions on Mysore santalum album, is a renewed awareness of just how good santalum album is. The demand for santalum album is as robust as ever. Individual consumers want it. So do the big perfume companies like Chanel, Guerlain, and Frederic Malle. And where there is demand, there is a way.

Currently, there are plantations of a new generation of santalum album being grown under controlled conditions in Australia, meaning that there will be a future supply of santalum album available to the market. And although the trees are still too young to compare the quality of the output to the original Mysore stock, the first results are promising. Many expert noses report the scent of santalum album grown in Australia to be exquisite, with the same creamy, soft, santalol-rich aroma characteristic of Mysore sandalwood.

The only differences at this stage are likely to be that of aging, both of the tree itself (specifically, its heartwood) and of the oil in the bottle. Aging works wonders for the quality of santalum album oil. Oil from heartwood that has been allowed to develop inside the tree for two decades or more will naturally be richer and more complete in aroma than heartwood cut out of a six-year-old tree. Still, these new santalum album plantations are good news for both attar and Western perfumery, as well as for sandalwood enthusiasts.

A word of caution^[v] from JK DeLapp about the new santalum album coming out of the Australian plantations (though it is likely that only diehard Mysore enthusiasts will care about this):

‘The Australian s. album quality is good, if we are looking at the total santalol content (santalols being the benchmark for sandalwood quality testing). A Grade Australian s. album tests at a consistent 90% total santalol load (our own Rising Phoenix sandalwood oils test at an average 91-93% total santalol load, for comparison sakes). I think the new Australian material is pretty close to this benchmark, although the trees are 20 or so years old, which is young for sandalwood. That means that you can distill it in good conscience, but its tone will lack the subtle nuances present oils drawn from the heartwood of older sandalwood trees.

One thing I’ve noticed with the new Australian album oils, though, is that they tend to smell like popcorn. If you like buttered popcorn, then great, you’re in luck. But it is a different type of “buttery” aroma that you get in older Mysore oils or in Rising Phoenix oils, which tends to be deeper and more sandalwoody (yes, that’s a word). Sandalwood enthusiasts will grasp immediately what I mean by that. For casual sandalwood oil users, I doubt the difference will matter much.

The upshot is that for large-scale compounding, I think the Australian album material is a great replacement for the Mysore oils of yore. But on its own, as a perfume for personal use, it won’t quite hit your sandalwood sweet spot in the same way. Therefore, globally, Australian plantation s. album is great news for larger scale perfumery, but it won’t satisfy customers in the small-batch, artisanal production sense.’

The same note of caution is sounded by Trygve Harris. Having visited the Mysore plantations twice – once in the late 1990s and again in 2012 – she is familiar with the oil coming out of India and how it compares to the newer Australian plantation s. album.

In an interview with me for Basenotes in March 2018, Harris noted: ‘The Australian album trees are quite young but are already being harvested and I think the odor profile matches the traditional one for sandalwood grown in Mysore. It is not the same, but if you are enquiring only if Santalum album will once again be available, then yes, I think it is already, and it smells good. And, if they keep up the plantations, then it will probably be better in a few years. But will we ever again smell that magical being from Karnataka? I don’t see it. Nature is patient. And nature is magic. And while plantation trees or laboratory Petri dishes might yield an ultimately adequate product, they won’t yield an exquisite or magical one’[vi].

Cover Image: Custom-designed by Jim Morgan.

[i] http://www.enfleurage.com/pages/Sandalwood%252dThe-Great-Receiver.html

[ii] http://www.basenotes.net/features/3505-conversations-with-the-artisan-amp-colon-jk-delapp-of-the-rising-phoenix-perfumery

[iii]Sometimes written as Kauvery

[iv] http://www.basenotes.net/features/3570-conversations-with-the-artisan-trygve-harris-of-enfleurage

[v] http://www.basenotes.net/features/3505-conversations-with-the-artisan-amp-colon-jk-delapp-of-the-rising-phoenix-perfumery

[vi] http://www.basenotes.net/features/3570-conversations-with-the-artisan-trygve-harris-of-enfleurage

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Attars & CPOs Mukhallats Resins The Attar Guide

The Attar Guide: Middle-Eastern Mukhallats

8th November 2021

Now we come to Middle-Eastern mukhallats. First, let’s get etymology out of the way. The word mukhallat simply means blend in Arabic and refers to a mix of pre-distilled attars and ruhs with other raw materials culturally significant in the Middle-Eastern perfumery, such as ambergris, oud oil, musk, resins, and amber accords. Remember, unlike traditional Indian attars, which are distilled, mukhallats are mixed, using already distilled or compounded materials.

One of the most famous types of mukhallat is the rose-oud mukhallat, a pairing that matches the sour, smoky bluntness of oud oil with the peppery brightness of Taifi rose. This coupling has taken the world of Western commercial perfumery by storm, flooding the market with hundreds of rose-oud fragrances that ape the structure of the original mukhallat template.

Of course, in modern-day parlance, the words attar and mukhallat are used almost interchangeably. Hence, Amouage calls its (sadly discontinued) range of perfume oils attars even though, from a technical perspective, they are mukhallats. The same applies to Sultan Pasha and most other young, modern attar makers – although technically mukhallats made by blending distilled attars and essential oils (some of which the attar maker may even distill himself), the final product is always marketed as an attar, because attar is the word that modern customers know and recognize.

It is important to note that the cultural ties and trade in perfume between India and the Middle-East go back thousands of years, which has led to a symbiotic exchange of materials, knowledge, and even language about perfume between these cultures. For example, the word attar is virtually identical across all major languages in the area, meaning Hindu, Urdu, Arabic, Farsi, Turkish, etc. Thanks to the rich melting pot of cultures and arts encouraged by the Mughal dynasty, themselves an empire of traders, attars are something of a fluid, boundary-crossing art, claimed by all cultures in this part of the world as their own.

But the culture of use of perfume throughout Turkey, Northern Africa, and the Middle East has evolved quite differently to that of India. Though it is difficult to speak on this without flattening entire and richly diverse cultures into one generalization, it is broadly accurate to say that people of Arabian, Persian, Turkish, and Northern African descent have a cultural preference for richer and heavier animalic aromas, such as those from oud, deer musk, and ambergris. While Indian attar perfumery is inward-looking, focused almost exclusively on India’s own natural bounty, Middle-Eastern oil perfumery avails itself of a much broader range of raw materials sourced outside their own national borders, likely the result of the centuries-long history of Arabic-Persiatic empire-building and trading.

Oud oil, for example, is sourced from humid jungle areas of a geographically-vast sweep of countries ranging from North India and Borneo island to China and the countries of the Mekong Delta (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand). Resins and gums such as frankincense (loban/luban) and myrrh are more important in Arabic oil perfumery than in Indian perfumery, because these resins are not native to India – they are grown and gathered in the hot, desert-like areas of Arabia and Africa (with some like copal resin, Peru and tolu balsams even coming all the way from Peru, Colombia, and Argentina, in South America). Use of these smoky, sometimes vanillic gums and resins has come to define a whole genre of perfume, formerly known (inaccurately) as the oriental family of perfumes (a term now being replaced by more culturally and etymologically-correct terminology, such as ambery or resinous perfumes, see note here). In general, the Middle-Eastern market for perfume displays a strong, cultural preference for more heavily perfumey smells than Indians.

But the cultural and historical links between these two perfume-making cultures run deep. Arab and Persian perfumers value Indian ruhs and attars for their purity and use them to mix into their mukhallats. One of the biggest attar companies in the world, Ajmal, is an Indian company that distills oud and makes mukhallats almost exclusively for the Middle-Eastern market. Furthermore, it was India, and specifically the Assam region in Northern India, that gave Arabs their first taste of oud oil, stoking a fire in their hearts for the animalic, Hindi (Indian) style of oud oil that burns brightly to this day.

End Note

Reminder: We are working our way through the four categories of oil-based perfumery as I see them, which are (1) traditional distilled attars (discussed here, here, and here), (2) Middle-Eastern mukhallats (this chapter), (3) foundational essential oils such as oud oil and sandalwood oil, and (4) concentrated perfume oils. The main differences are briefly outlined below:

Traditional distilled attars: In contrast to its catch-all categorization today, the word attar originally referred to a specific method of production, and a tradition that was almost exclusively Indian. True attars are made through the slow, laborious process of hydro- or steam-distilling flower petals, herbs, exotic woods, and resins directly into a base of sandalwood oil.

Middle-Eastern mukhallats: While traditional Indian attars are distilled from a fragrant material, mukhallats – meaning ‘mix’ – are compounds of many different oils that have already been distilled, tinctured, or otherwise produced elsewhere.

Foundational essential oils: Sandalwood and oud are truly essential oils, in that they are the building blocks of their respective styles of perfumery. In traditional Indian attar perfumery, fragrant materials are distilled directly into sandalwood oil, while in Middle-Eastern mukhallat perfumery, the Arabian passion for oud means that a blend that doesn’t feature it is considered a poor excuse for a perfume. Furthermore, both sandalwood and oud feature such complex aroma profiles that they wear more like a complete perfume than an essential oil.

Concentrated perfume oils: Although all attars are by nature concentrated perfume oils, not all concentrated perfume oils are attars. For example, a perfume oil from Bruno Acampora, Le Labo, or BPAL is not an attar. Neither is the Al Rehab dupe for Dakar Noir that you can buy on Amazon for four dollars. They are perfumes in oil format but made in a completely different manner (and intent) than attars.

Cover Image: Custom-designed by Jim Morgan.

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Attars & CPOs The Attar Guide

The Attar Guide: Complex Indian Attars

5th November 2021

Complex Indian attars are the result of a multi-distillation process, whereby several fragrant materials are co-distilled in the same deg or created by mixing several distillates and attars together after distillation.

In a multi-distillation process, the various fragrant materials are placed in the deg to be distilled together, with the distillers adjusting and adding to the formula over the course of the ten, or even twenty-day distillation process, beginning each day with a new blend of botanicals, resins, herbs, and spices.

Alternatively, some complex attars are built by mixing already-distilled attars, ruhs, choyas, or sandalwood oils together. Ambery attars, for example, although not a huge feature of Indian attar perfumery, are not derived through a single distillation of an amber material, but instead composed of several complete essential oils from materials such as labdanum and benzoin. Below is a description of some of the most characteristic and significant of complex traditional Indian attars.

Majmua Attar

Majmua attar is a complex blend of four other already-distilled attars and ruhs, namely, ruh khus, ruh kewra, mitti attar, and kadam attar (described individually here). Majmua displays deep, green forest-like tones first, then the pungency of hay or saffron, followed by soft fruits, brown earth, the scent of rain on terracotta pots, herbs, flowers, hay, and moss. Majmua is also suggestive of the furriness of warm animals, without containing even a drop of musk. Evolving over the course of a day, its transition from one set of aromas to the next is nothing short of mesmerizing. If one aroma could be said to predominate, it would be the bitter, mossy greenness of herbs.

Together, the combined aromas in the attar mimic the lush, earthy feel of India during monsoon season. Majmua is powerful to the point of being overbearing, especially to a Western nose. Therefore, it is not a bad idea to dilute it in carrier oil before using as a personal perfume. A Turkish perfumer friend of mine (Omer Pekji) layers it under Serge Lutens’ beastly Muscs Khoublai Khan, and I can confirm that this combination of bitter, green, and foresty with musky, sugary, and rosy works to perfection.

Shamama

Shamama, sometimes also called hina (not to be confused with gul hina, which is a henna-only attar), is a highly complex attar distilled from a compound of more than sixty different aromatic materials such as woods, moss, cloves, ambrette seed, saffron, and sandalwood. Shamama attar also seems to be semi-analogous with so-called shamamatul amber, which possibly involves an evolution of the original formula to include heavier woods, labdanum, and musks. Shamamatul amber can be as pungent and as animalic as some Hindi ouds.

The exact recipe to shamama is a closely-held secret. Each traditional attar-making family has its own recipe, which is handed down from father to son unaltered. The big attar companies also produce their own version of shamama. The diversity among shamama attars means that no one shamama smells like the other.

There are any grades of shamama attar, ranging from $50 per kilo to $2,000 per kilo, depending on the amount, quality, and type of raw materials used (some shamama attars are distilled into pure sandalwood, others over a synthetic solvent like IPM). Interestingly, M.L. Ramnarain, a Kannauj-based attar distillery, which sells most of its shamama attar to Europe and the Middle East, must keep the different shamama distillations destined for different market separate[i]. This is because most shamama attars contain charila, an oakmoss-like lichen, and therefore cannot be sold in the EU, due to the ban on the atranol contained within the material, i.e., much the same issues pertaining to European oakmoss absolute. (Read more about that here).

According to Chris McMahon of White Lotus Aromatics, the traditional shamama attar will normally contain some combination of ‘turmeric, spikenard, yew, oakmoss, cardamom, juniper berry, nutmeg, mace, clove bud, ambrette seed, laurel berry, valerian, and red sandalwood’^[i]. It is a recipe that can be varied or added to in a seemingly infinite number of ways. With the advent of cheaper synthetics and the contraction in the traditional art of attar-making, the number of families still producing shamama in the traditional manner is tiny. Most shamama attars on the market these days are a mixture of synthetics and naturals, with many of them smelling surprisingly good.

Even so, it is interesting to look at the old-school method of distilling shamama attar^[ii]. It is a process that is far more complex and laborious than a single-material attar, and it takes at least two months to make one from start to finish. The distillation is divided into stages. The first stage is a distillation of charila, a lacy lichen covering rocks in the forests of the Himalayas that possesses an inky, bitter, mossy aroma similar to that of European oakmoss. (Shamama distillations meant for the European market will accordingly skip this particular step). The charila is hydro-distilled directly into sandalwood oil in the classic manner over a period of ten days. The second stage is a distillation of ground-up and lightly roasted aromatic plants, roots, and botanicals, many of which are unfamiliar to the Western nose, like spikenard, valerian root, cyperus root, and sugandh kokila, a dried berry from an evergreen laurel-like tree that grows in Nepal. The aromatics are distilled into the lichen-fragrant sandalwood oil from the first stage.

Photo: Charila, a type of Indian lichen that is similar to oakmoss. Photo by Pranjal Kapoor.

The third stage is a spice and herb distillation. Each day, fresh quantities of pulverized cinnamon, cardamom, mace, nutmeg, clove, patchouli leaves, and ambrette seeds are loaded into the deg, with the vapors pouring directly into the aromatized sandalwood oil in the bhapka, itself already heady with moss and aromatics.

Photo: Aromatics, spice, and dried plant material being loaded into the deg. Photo by Pranjal Kapoor.

An optional fourth stage for the attar wallah, separate to the distillation process, is to prepare a choya. There are three main types. Choya nakh consists of seashells that are first charred, roasted, and smoked over a dry fire in a sand pit, and then macerated and cooked gently in sandalwood oil. Choya nakh is also not permitted as an ingredient for shamama attars destined for the European market, due to the phenols present in the material after the charring process. When strained, the oil is aromatized with a mysteriously smoky, salty aroma. Tango by Aftelier is one of the few artisanal, non-attar perfumes that featured choya nakh (review here), however it is no longer available. Choya loban is a dry distillation of frankincense resin, whereby the liquid tears of resin are either scraped off the inside of the heated degs or the vapors directed into a receiving vessel (without sandalwood oil). Choya Ral is a balsamic dry distillation of the resin of the Sal Tree (Shorea robusta) that yields a dark, sweetly resinous smoky-leathery aroma that is useful in a fougère composition. The attar maker may choose to prepare and add a choya to the main shamama distillate as and when they see fit. The choyas add a smoky, resinous depth to the shamama.

The final stage is mixing the shamama attar with already-distilled attars, such as attar of roses, jasmine, kewra, champaca, and so on. Before finishing, other fragrant materials such as rose hydrosols, musk grains and even ambergris tinctures are added, left to macerate in a sealed pot over a very low fire for twenty-four hours, skimmed for purity, and poured into leather caskets to age and settle. Given the complexity and difficulty involved in producing shamama attar, it is no wonder, then, that a traditionally-distilled hina or shamama attar with the full whack of natural raw materials starts at a minimum of $2,000 per kilo^[iii].

Despite their differences, shamama attars do share some basic common characteristics, such as a bitter, medicinal topnote, notes of earth and vetiver, a pungent saffron or henna note with hay and iodine tonalities, a rich ambery-aromatic heart, animalic facets that mimic the scent or texture of ambergris, civet, heavy musk, and Hindi oud, and tenacious basenotes that smell like moss, wood, baked earth, tea leaves, and medicinal ointment.

Kasturi-Type Attars (Black Musk Attars)

Black musk or Kasturi-type attars count as a complex attar rather than a single-material attar because, despite the name, they rarely contain natural deer musk. The hunting and killing of musk deer in India and Pakistan is illegal, and although this does not mean that attars containing real deer musk do not exist, most Kasturi-type attars use other ingredients to approximate the scent of musk. This is more due to issues of cost and availability than legality.

Kasturi-type attars derive their musky aroma through a complex array of aromatics and botanicals such as patchouli, costus root, and vetiver, mixed with either a botanical or synthetic musk. In the past, ambrette seed oil would have been the main material used to mimic the muskiness of genuine deer musk, but today, due to reasons of cost, attar makers likely use other less expensive musk botanicals or a combination of synthetic musk molecules. Musk plays a far more significant part in Arabian perfumery than in traditional Indian attar perfumery.

Cover Image: Custom-designed by Jim Morgan.

Photos: Kindly given to me by Pranjal Kapoor with full permission to use in these posts.

[i] The White Lotus Aromatics newsletter on hina (no longer available online)

[ii] I am indebted to Chris McMahon of White Lotus Aromatics for the bulk of the information on the complex process of distilling shamama attars.

[iii] http://www.basenotes.net/features/3505-conversations-with-the-artisan-amp-colon-jk-delapp-of-the-rising-phoenix-perfumery

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Attars & CPOs The Attar Guide

Indian Single-Material Attars and Ruhs

3rd November 2021

Traditional Indian attars (and ruhs) can be divided roughly into two groups. First, there are attars made by distilling a single material, like, for example, rose or vetiver. (These are the subject of this chapter). Then, there are the more complex attars made by co-distilling several materials in the same deg or mixing several distilled attars and ruhs together. The range and diversity of the fragrant materials used in traditional attars is astonishing – Westerners will likely have not heard of half of these plants or combinations.

Indians regard their native plants and herbs as possessing ayurvedic properties and use them accordingly. Attars such as musk, hina (shamama) and majmua, for example, are warming attars for when the weather is cold, whereas mitti, kewra, and ruh khus attars are seen as cooling, refreshing oils to be used in hot, muggy weather. Below is description of the main types of single-material ruhs and attars distilled from one single aromatic material using the hydro-distillation method.

Ruh Khus

Translating roughly to ‘the spirit of vetiver’, ruh khus is an essential oil traditionally distilled from wild vetiver roots using traditional methods in Northern India. Its characteristic color – a glowing mélange of lurid greens and blues – actually comes from the copper vessels used in the distillation process rather than the rhizome itself. The copper pots add a slightly metallic tinge to the aroma profile of the oil, but this is considered a desirable property. Ruh Khus used to be exclusively distilled from wild vetiver roots, but due to unpredictable yields and the labor intensive nature of the distillation process, plantation-grown roots are increasingly used.

The scent of Ruh Khus is cleansing and spiritual, encompassing as it does all the possible facets of pure vetiver oil, from soft, buff-colored nutty notes to deep green foresty aspects. The main flavor wall of a Ruh Khus will always be the grassy-nutty-rooty aroma of vetiver root, but behind the main bouquet, you can pick up on the more complex facets of the root’s aroma profile such as sweet spices, smoke, earth, roses, olives, grass, clay, saffron, and hazelnuts. Its fresh, grassy aroma is most appreciated during hot summer weather, when it provides a cooling effect. Indians also make a very refreshing drink (khus water) from vetiver roots macerated in water.

Ruh Gulab

Gul means rose in Hindi, although the word is sometimes also loosely interpreted as ‘flower’. Ruh gulab is an extremely costly essential oil of roses, distilled from rosa damascena rose petals (the Bulgarian and Turkish varietal of rose). It is also known as rose otto. The scent of ruh gulab is strong, spicy-sweet, and richly rosy. Ruh gulab is distilled primarily over a forty-day period (mid-March to late April), which is when the roses are at their best, and exclusively in Hasayan, a village in North India that lies 200km away from Kannauj[1]. Ruh gulab is so costly to produce that what is usually marketed as ruh gulab is actually an attar of roses, i.e., rose distilled over a solvent such as sandalwood oil or IPM.

Attar of Roses/ Attar Gulab

When rose petals are distilled into pure sandalwood oil or another solvent, it is no longer a ruh, but an attar, known worldwide as the famous attar of roses (or sometimes, Attar Gulab). Attar of roses production takes place in Kannauj itself over nine months of the year, using Bourbon roses (Rosa bourboniana) rather than rosa damascena.

Ruh Kewra

Translating to ‘soul of the screwpine flower’, this beautiful ruh smells like raw honey and fresh, creamy white flowers undercut by a delicate fruit note. Ruh Kewra is extracted from the kewra flower (Pandanus odoratissimus), a plant native to Odisha state, through the steam distillation process. The top notes are rather piercing and shrill, like sucking on a copper penny, but it subsequently develops into a sweet, smooth fruity-floral aroma that is very pleasant.

A Kewra Attar is similar to a Ruh Kewra, but as the name suggests, the attar version is not a pure essential oil of the material (screwpine) but instead distilled over a solvent such as sandalwood oil (if natural) or IPM, TEC, Migyol, etc. (if synthetic). Kewra is very valuable to the tobacco and food industry because it is potent enough to flavor syrups, cosmetics, and tobacco leaves without losing any of its characteristic honey and fruit tones. Correspondingly, when used in attar perfumery, attar wallahs must be careful not to allow kewra to overtake all the other elements.

Kewra is also popularly known as pandan. Pandan leaves are used as liberally in Eastern cookery as vanilla is in Western cookery. The leaves can be chewed or used to wrap up sticky rice and chicken, but it is most commonly used to flavor desserts, sweet syrups, and drinks. Pandan syrup leaves a hauntingly sweet, floral taste in the mouth that, once tasted or smelled, will never be forgotten.

Mitti Attar

Mitti is one of those extraordinary attars that make one wonder at the resourcefulness of man and his determination to make perfume out of everything. Mitti is an attar distilled from the dry, cracked earth of India at the end of the dry season, and it smells of exactly that moment when the first drops of rain of the monsoon season come down and drench the cracked earth. For many Indian people, mitti is the scent of longing.

The process of making mitti attar is a complex and arduous one. First, villagers will identify a dried-up well, river, or lake where they can excavate earth that will still have a little moisture in it. Clods of earth are dug up from the ground and transported in trucks to open-air potteries, where potters take the clods and use water to massage them into a sort of dough or clay, which they then shape into cup-like vessels. The potters partially bake the cups in kilns, whereupon they are removed and brought to the distilleries^[i].

As described very beautifully by Christopher McMahon on the White Lotus Aromatics blogpost on mitti (unfortunately no longer available), the partially-baked earthen cups are then stacked one on top of another in the deg, the copper cooking cauldron, sealed, and unusually for an attar, first heated without water in order to allow the mysterious earth molecules to vaporize and imbue the sandalwood oil with their scent more strongly. Only later is the water added, and when it is, it is fed through a small hole in the deg rather than unsealing the whole pot and exposing the delicate baked earth to the air.

The point of this process is to aromatize the receiver oil most strongly with the scent of dry, baked earth, before adding water. The addition of water alters the scent of the vapor slightly, shifting from dusty earth to slightly moist soil. Since the mitti attar captures both the dry dust of sunbaked earth and the scent of raindrops hitting that dry earth, using this combination of distilling methods ensures both dry and damp facets are captured.

Unlike most other attars, the deg is cooked over a fire only for two hours a day before being allowed to cool and rest. After the water is siphoned off the essential oil and sandalwood in the bhapka, the deg is loaded with new earthen cups, dry baked, and the hydrosol from the day before added in later. The process is repeated over twenty days and stopped when the oil in the bhapka is strongly aromatized with the scent of earth, both dry and damp.

The mysterious scent owes its strange, haunting power to the compound called geosmin, which recalls the smell of things once rain has fallen on them: think of the hot asphalt smell of the streets in the city after a downpour, or the smell of earth and grass out in the countryside. Mitti attar captures the petrichor effect of rain drenching the red, cracked earth in India, because it is made from that same earth. It smells simultaneously musty and earthy, with a certain ‘red’ dustiness one associates with terracotta pots.

Kadam Attar

It is challenging to talk about kadam because it is expensive, and almost impossible to source outside of India. However, it is one of the most prized floral attars in India and forms a key component of the famous majmua attar, so it is worth discussing on that basis alone.

Distilled from the small, yellow bushy flowers of the Anthocephalus cadamba, kadam (sometimes written as kandam) produces a complex floral oil said to possess a green, almost minty topnote akin to Borneo oud wood, and a yellow floral tonality in the base that runs close to the creaminess of champaca.

Attar Mehndi / Gul Heena

Attar Mehndi, or Gul Heena, a name which translates to ‘flower of henna’, is an attar derived from distilling henna leaves (Lawsonia Inermis) directly into sandalwood oil. Mehndi attar comes from the same plant as the popular red dye that is used to paint elaborate patterns onto the hands and face of brides in most Indian weddings, be it a Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh ceremony. There is also a Ruh Mehndi, but it is very expensive at $43,000 per kilogram (while the attar ranges between $500 and $5,000 per kilogram)[2].

The scent of mehndi attar is that of earth, hay, flower petals, ink, baked clay, and iodine. (The ruh smells greener, with a tobacco-ish facet). It possesses a haunting astringency that can suck all the moisture from your nostrils. I find Mehndi attar to be roughly in the same aroma family as saffron and turmeric, although these are spices and therefore dustier, sharper, and more austere.

Confusingly, the name ‘hina’ (heena) is often applied to the complex mixed attar known as shamama, which leans on Gul Heena as a key component of its aroma profile. According to Pranjal Kapoor, whose family business distills mehndi attar, it blends very well with oud oil and ruh khus. Its scent profile is not very well known outside of Europe and is therefore sadly under-utilized in Western niche or artisanal perfumery. Strangelove NYC’s fallintostars is a happy exception – it uses a heena attar distilled by M.L. Ramnarain. (Review here).

Jasmine ruhs and attars (Motia, Chameli, and Juhi)

In the Kama Sutra, jasmine is described as the most carnal smell in nature. But jasmine balances its fleshy, creamy, and sensual side with a dewy freshness. Innocence and carnality in one flower – an irresistible combination! The word jasmine comes from the Arabic word for the flower, yâsamîn, which itself comes from the Persian word for it, again demonstrating the cultural and etymological fluidity between the Indian, Persian, and Arab worlds when it comes to perfume.

Jasmine petals can be distilled into either a ruh (pure essence) or an attar (distilled into sandalwood oil). There are three different types of jasmine species used in attars, and thus three different names for the attars. Motia (or mogra, as it is sometimes written) is the most popular, and is made from Jasminum sambac, the famous ‘Arabian’ jasmine. Ruh motia is distilled exclusively in Kannauj (whereas solvent-extracted absolutes and concretes can be found elsewhere). Chameli attar is made from Jasminum grandiflorum, the type of jasmine grown in India and in Grasse and used in classic French perfumery. Juhi attar is made from Jasminum auriculatum. The auriculatum variety (Juhi attar) is simply a three-petalled subset of the sambac jasmine, and so the differences between them are negligible. The differences between sambac and grandiflorum, on the other hand, are more significant.

Sambac jasmine (motia or mogra) is lean and sharp, with a spicy edge that some find addicting. Also known as Arabian jasmine, Sambac is full-throated, fruity, leathery, and often a bit coarse. Sambac jasmine is usually more indolic than grandiflorum, but I find that it really depends on the individual batch. There is a surprising greenness to sambac jasmine, with a crisp, minty facet that does a nice job of balancing out its spicy, indolic side. Some Sambac jasmine oils have a tea-like character as well.

The grandiflorum variety (Chameli) is the epitome of refined sensuality – a lady to the sambac’s tramp. It is sweet, luscious, and full-bodied, with a hint of overripe fruit that approaches decay in the most charming way possible. Under some circumstances, it can smell like petrol, bananas, or bubblegum, largely due to the strong presence of benzyl acetate, an isolate in the chemical make-up of both jasmine and ylang that contributes to its tropical, steamy character. Most attars and mukhallats reviewed in this Guide use the sambac variety of the flower (the so-called Arabian jasmine), although in India, practically every variant of the flower is revered and appreciated.

As an aside, I have not been overly impressed with the way jasmine oil is used in mukhallat or attar perfumery beyond the basic motia attar, which is nice in and of itself. When used in complex compositions and blends, I find that the special characteristics of the sambac tend to get swallowed up and flattened out into an overly sweet ‘bubblegum’ accord that seems to be analogous with other sweet florals like orange blossom or champaca. In my experience, Sultan Pasha makes the best complex jasmine-focused attars available today, and Abdul Samad Al Qurashi the dullest.

Other Flowers: Genda, Nargis, Lotus, and Champa

Genda attar is made from marigold (tagetes minuta), which, for a flower, smells uniquely herbaceous, bitter, and spicy. Its astringent tonality has something in common with saffron, and indeed, the two are often blended together. Calligraphy Saffron by Aramis is a good example of a commercial niche fragrance where saffron and tagetes are used to complement each other, leaving a synesthetic imprint of something sharply yellow-gold in the wearer’s mind. Genda attar is uncommon outside of India, but marigold itself is used quite cleverly in some other mukhallats and perfume oils, one example being Aroosah by Al Rehab.

Nargis is the Indo-Persian word for narcissus (daffodils, jonquils), and so nargis attar is made using narcissus oil. Wherever this is sold online, it is described as possessing a pleasantly fruity and floral aroma. Do not believe a word of it. Narcissus oil smells green but also ludicrously filthy, with the barnyardy twang of a stable packed to the rafters with dirty hay. It eventually softens into a fresh yellow-green floral aroma that is indeed very similar to the smell of fresh daffodils. Narcissus is used extensively in fine French perfumery to give florals a starchy-oily greenness perched between freshness and dirtiness.

There are three different types of lotus (kamal) attars, but only two of those types (pink lotus and white lotus) technically belong to the true lotus family of nelumbo nucifera. Then there is the blue lotus of Egypt, which, strictly speaking, belongs to the lily family. Lotus flowers are revered in Buddhist and Hindi culture, long considered to be a direct route to spirituality.

Both the pink and white lotus varieties are extremely expensive to produce, requiring 250,000 flowers to make just one kilogram of lotus concrete, which in turn yields only about 250 grams of absolute after washing^[ii]. This to emphasize just how costly true lotus absolute is, and how rarely seen on today’s market, especially outside of India itself. I have smelled a white lotus absolute but cannot attest as to its authenticity. The absolute of pink and white lotus flowers smells golden, honeyed, soft, powdery, and somewhat resinous. Voyage 2019 by Hiram Green (review here) is the rare Western niche perfume to feature natural pink lotus oil as an ingredient.

Champa attar is perhaps the most famous floral attar from India. It is made from the champaca flower, revered across the Indian subcontinent and much of tropical Asia as a symbol of sacred femininity. Champaca absolute smells rich and creamy, similar in general aroma profile to magnolia, but with a denser, muskier body weight. It features hints of bubblegum, green apple peel, mint, and apricot. The musky nuances of champaca are interesting, because it sometimes comes across as indolic, but then at other times, as clean and as starchy as a laundry musk.

It must be the clean, fruity facets of the flower that dominate for most, however, because this is a flower traditionally associated with cleanliness. In fact, the word ‘champa’ gave rise to the word ‘shampoo’ by way of the Sanskrit word for champaca, ‘champo’, which means ‘to massage’^[iii]. Champaca oil is widely used in Asia to fragrance many of its functional products such as soap, detergent, and shampoo.

Champaca is possessed of a steamy, almost tropical character that can remind one of hot basmati rice and green tea. It has an indolic facet like jasmine (although less distinctive) and a heady fruity side that makes it similar to some aspects of ylang (but more delicate). It is a traditionally feminine flower, prized by women for its sensual but clean character. Champaca oil is also used in the recipes for traditional Indian pressed cone or stick incense, the world-famous nag champa.

Aromatics and spices: Indians distill attars and essential oils from a very broad range of aromatics and spices not listed here, such as charila (an oakmoss-like lichen), patchouli, saffron, and spikenard (jatamansi). These will be discussed in full detail in the section of the Attar Guide that deals with earthy, spicy, and aromatic notes in oil-based perfumery.

Cover Image: Custom-designed by Jim Morgan.

Photos: All photos used in this chapter were provided to me by Pranjal Kapoor, with full permission to use.

[1][1] Information by way of Pranjal Kapoor.

[2] Ibid.

[i] I am indebted to Chris McMahon of White Lotus Aromatics for his detailed description of the process of making mitti attar in his 2000 newsletter (sadly no longer available)

[ii] As above, Chris McMahon’s description of white and pink lotus absolutes informed this section, but is unfortunately no longer available online.

[iii] The Encyclopedia of Essential Oils, by Julia Lawless, 2014 edition, published by HarperThorsons, pg. 72

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Attars & CPOs The Attar Guide The Business of Perfume

The Attar Guide: Traditionally Distilled Attars and Ruhs

1st November 2021

Attar – an old Persian word for perfume (ațr, pronounced atir) – is the world’s earliest form of fragrance still in existence today. The word ‘attar’ is used in some form in most of the languages of the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East, for example, ittar or ittr in Hindu and Urdu, ‘etr in Arabic, and ațr in modern-day Farsi. The words ottar, atar, athar, and otto are also forms of the word attar, and used pretty much interchangeably.

Originally, the word referred to any fragrant smell emanating from a person, thing, or plant. For example, if a person had particularly sweet-smelling skin, his or her scent might be described as attar, as in ‘Da-yum, Fatima, you smell attar, girl’. But with the discovery of man-made interventions such as distillation, maceration, and enfleurage, the word attar began to specifically refer to perfumes made using those new methods^[i]. When people discovered how to extract essential oils from plants, woods, and resins in the early 1600s, the word ‘attar’ began to be associated almost exclusively with essential oil extracted from roses. Beyond the world famous attar of roses, few outside India were aware of the incredible diversity and range of raw materials beyond rose that could be distilled, extracted, macerated, or enfleuraged to make attars.

Perhaps proving that fragrance is a marker of true civilization, attars were first made by inhabitants of the Indus Valley Civilization (3300 BCE-1300 BCE) which was, along with ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, was one of the three major cradles of civilization. Covering most of modern-day Pakistan and India, the people living there at the time were Indian in the cultural-historical sense. These people were the first to distill and make attars. And despite attar being a word that was later co-opted by Persian and Arab cultures, its origins remain deeply rooted in Indian culture and taxonomy. Interestingly, clay pots (degs) unearthed belonging to the Indus Valley Civilization are almost identical to the ones used today in modern-day India to produce attars.

There is no evidence that attar-making died when the Indus Valley Civilization did. However, attar making truly rose to global prominence under the Mughal Empire in 1526, a Turco-Mongolian dynasty in India that was culturally Persian. The Mughal emperors and princes, passionate about perfume, oversaw the flowering of a golden age of attar-making that outlasted the Mughal Empire itself, which ended over three centuries later in 1857. Ultimately, therefore, although the tradition of making attars is culturally an Indian one, it was the Persiatic culture of the Mughal Empire that caused attar making to flourish past the borders of India herself. So enthusiastically did the Mughal emperors award money and prestige to local Indian attar makers (attar wallahs) that they birthed a golden age for attar making.

We know about the earliest forms of attar production through Islamic texts and historical trading records, but some of the most revealing pieces of information come to us via story telling from the Mughal Empire period. In the 17th century, the Mughal Emperor Jahangir credits his mother-in-law, Saleemah Sultan Begum, for having accidentally discovered how to make rose otto:

‘When she was making rose water, a scum formed on the surface of the dishes into which the hot rose water was poured from the jugs. She collected this scum little by little; when much rose water was obtained a considerable quantity of the scum was collected. It is of such strength in perfume that if one drop be rubbed on the palm of the hand it scents a whole assembly and it seems as if many red rosebuds had bloomed at once. There is no other scent of equal excellence to it. It restores hearts that have gone and brings back withered souls. In reward for that invention, I presented a string of pearls to the inventor.’

From Deg to Lab: The Sad State of Attar Making in India

Photo by Rebecca Matthews on Unsplash

It takes enormous skill and knowledge to make an attar in the traditional way, and having practiced it for over five thousand years, the Indians are the masters of this art. The traditional seat of the attar-making world is Kannauj, the capital city of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Kannauj-based attar-makers supplied the princes of the Mughal Empire with attars for more than three centuries and have a long history of trading with the Middle East. Surrounded by silt-rich fields and valleys that grow an extraordinary range of exotic flowers, aromatics grasses, roses, and herbs, Kannauj is justifiably called the Grasse of the attar world.

Between 90 to 90% of all essential oils, ruhs, and attars produced in Kannauj are consumed by India’s domestic food and tobacco industries, where they are used to flavor cigarettes, chewing gum, dessert syrups, and food bases. The remaining is used domestically as perfume or exported abroad, mainly to the Middle East (the Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Kuwait). But the millennia-old attar industry in Kannauj is under threat from the most modern of foes, namely, the cost and availability of key raw materials, and a rising economic class with very different tastes to their forefathers.

Materials such as rose and jasmine have always been expensive to produce, because they are labor-intensive, and a great quantity of fragrant materials is required to produce even a small amount of a ruh or attar. A ten milliliter bottle of genuine rosa damascena oil (ruh gulab) costs approximately $250 in Kannauj, but the same amount of synthetic rose oil costs only $8. Adulteration and fakery of the costliest oils has always been an issue.

What is (relatively) new is the dearth of sandalwood oil, the essential oil that has always been a key component of traditional Indian attars. As will be detailed in the section on sandalwood, the great sandalwood forests of Mysore and other wood-producing regions are almost depleted due to years of over-harvesting, corruption, and careless management. In the late nineties, in response to the sandalwood crisis, the state governments of Karnataka, Mysore, and Uttar Pradesh all placed severe restrictions on the harvesting and trading of sandalwood oil. At a national level, the Indian Government banned the export of sandalwood outside of India’s borders.

Although the supply channel to the great perfumery houses of Chanel and Guerlain in Paris has been kept partly open (through private French ownership of plantations), the restrictions meant that the supply of Mysore oil outside of India is extremely limited, as well as technically illegal. In turn, the flow of oil to the domestic attar industry dried to a trickle. With only tiny amounts of santalum album still reaching the domestic market, prices within India have risen to levels that price most attar makers out of the picture.

The reduced flow of oil to attar-producing houses in Kannauj has resulted in many attar houses packing up and leaving to settle in areas of India such as Mumbai, where sandalwood oil is still perhaps a little easier to obtain, thanks to less stringent government oversight than in Uttar Pradesh. But a big question mark hovers over the purity of the sandalwood oil that does remain on the market in India, whether in Mumbai or elsewhere. Because of scarcity, costs have escalated, leading to what seems now to be a common adulteration of the oil with paraffin, DPG, or inferior wood oils.

When you put together the high costs of production and the low availability of key ingredients, it is no wonder that many of the small, independent attar-making houses in Kannauj have gone out of business. At its height, approximately sixty percent of the population of the 1.7 million-strong city was employed in the attar industry. Until the restrictions on sandalwood oil production came about in the nineties, there were over seven hundred distilleries operating in Kannauj. Now there are only a hundred and fifty. The traditional attar making industry has shrunk by almost eighty percent over the past three decades.

But perhaps the greatest pressure on the traditional Indian attar-making industry in Kannauj has been the rise in demand for Western designer perfumes among young, upwardly mobile males in the large Indian cities, a new socio-economic class that emerged during India’s great economic turnaround in urban areas in the nineties. Flush with new wealth and an emerging middle class, attention has turned away from the traditional Indian attars and towards more modern, Western-orientated grooming products. The Indian trade association, ASSOCHAM, reports that the demand for Western brands such as Azzaro, Burberry, Chanel, and Armani amounts to a hefty 30% of total fragrance consumption in India and is worth almost $300 million.

In order to pivot towards the market, two things happened in Kannauj. First, the traditional Indian attar makers still in business have scrambled to adapt to a new business model. While some (such as M. L. Ramnarain Perfumers) have stuck to old distillation methods, and switched to using solvents other than sandalwood, many other outfits, especially the Mumbai-based ones, have lowered their cost base (and therefore prices) by using paraffin oils to pad out their formulas to retain the interest of the modern Indian fragrance market. A quick scan of IndiaMart shows many attar houses now offering so-called ‘traditional’ motia (Sambac jasmine) and gulab (rosa damascena) attars for as little as $45 per liter, a price that in and of itself betrays its synthetic composition. If made in the traditional way in Kannauj, using a deg and bhapka, and real jasmine petals, a liter of genuine motia attar would cost more in the region of $5,400 ^[ii].

Second, some attar factories in Mumbai began focusing on churning out cheap perfume oils and dupes of the most popular Western fragrances instead of traditional Indian attars or ruhs. These have become something of a modern success story, in the business sense. These factories create their oils in the laboratory rather than in the traditional deg and bhapka, and they don’t even pretend that there is anything traditionally Indian about them. In fact, it is their Western character that is emphasized, designed to appeal to young Indian tastes. Their oils are also commonly called ‘attars’, which must feel like salt in the wound of any attar house in Kannauj still distilling their attars in the time-honored manner.

Somewhere in the nineties, therefore, the meaning of the word attar began its slow, inexorable drift away from its traditional meaning (raw plant material distilled into a sandalwood base) to a more modern interpretation, meaning any perfume that comes in oil format. The word attar now can mean anything from a shamama attar distilled for two months to a knock-off of Tom Ford’s Tuscan Leather that costs less than a hundred rupees.

All is not lost, however. Despite the problems in the industry at present, some small-scale traditional attar production continues, and given its millennia-long history, it is not likely that traditional Indian attars will ever disappear completely. The pendulum of interest will swing back again in that direction, especially if there is a return to valuing heritage and tradition, as has been the case in many countries once the dust of an economic boom has settled. Artisanship will always be valued as a segment of the total fragrance industry, alongside an appreciation for excellent raw materials.

How Traditionally Distilled Attars and Ruhs are Made

Photo by Rowan Lamb on Unsplash

Traditional distilled attars are made in much the same way as they were way during the Indus Valley Civilization. The main components of traditional attar making are copper or earthen drums called a deg, a copper receiving vessel (containing sandalwood oil) called a bhapka, and the slowest and most gentle of all extraction techniques, namely hydro-distillation. Steam distillation, which is conducted at much higher temperatures, is also used, but only for harder resin or woody materials less likely to burn than, for example, more delicate materials such as jasmine petals.

Photo courtesy of Pranjal Kapoor

The process is slow and laborious. First, up to forty-five kilos of fragrant materials – for example, rose petals, henna flowers, or jasmine blossoms – are loaded into the deg. The deg is then filled to the top with water so that the fragrant materials float freely in the liquid, and the lid sealed with a mixture of wet clay, straw, and cotton fibers. The deg rests on top of a clay or brick oven that is maintained at a very low heat throughout the day. Once the fire is lit, it will be kept going for at least eight hours^[iii].

Photo courtesy of Pranjal Kapoor

Once the deg is heated, the aromatic vapors begin to build up inside the pot and these then pass through an angled bamboo pipe into the long-necked copper bhapka waiting underneath the deg in a shallow basin of water, which serves to instantly cool the vapors flowing into the bhapka and change it into liquid. The awaiting bhapka will already contain up to five kilograms of pure sandalwood oil, prized for both its beautiful aroma and fixative properties. Indian attar makers are extremely skilled at keeping temperatures steady and low throughout the process, often sponging the deg down with cool water if they feel that it is overheating.

Photo courtesy of Pranjal Kapoor

At the end of the day, the fire is extinguished and the liquid in the bhapka is left to cool and settle overnight. In the morning, the water (called a hydrosol) has separated from the oil and is carefully siphoned off to be poured back into the deg for the new days’ worth of distilling. Fresh fragrant materials are placed in the deg, along with the hydrosol, and the process is repeated. Most distillations take between ten and twenty days to complete, all the time adding fresh fragrant materials and re-using the hydrosol, which by the end will have passed through the flowers so many times that it itself is fragrant and can be sold for use in skincare and food preparation.

But the real prize is what’s in the bhapka – a thick sandalwood oil fragrant with the heady scent of the flowers, herbs, or other aromatic materials. The attar is then poured into flasks made from soft calfskin or lambskin leather, materials just porous enough to allow any excess water in the mixture to evaporate but sturdy enough to keep the fragrant attar inside. The flasks are stored in a dark, dry place until the attar has matured and settled into its final aroma, a process that takes at least a year but can take up to ten.

Sometimes, attars make use of materials that cannot be extracted using steam or water, such as resins and gums. In such cases, the material – for example, frankincense gum or myrrh resin – is heated up until it produces liquid tears that are scraped off the inside of the heated deg and then mixed into sandalwood oil. The attars are then macerated, filtered, stored, and matured in the same way as the regular floral attars.

Then there are the ruhs. Ruh in a Sanskrit word for ‘essence’ or ‘spirit’. Ruhs are essential oils distilled from a limited number of Indian flowers, herbs, and plants in much the same way as attars, i.e., gentle hydro-distillation using the traditional deg and bhapka. Unlike attars, however, ruhs are not distilled into sandalwood but left in their undiluted state. At the end of a distilling day, the distillate is allowed to rest and cool, and the next morning, the water is siphoned off the essential oil. The ruh is then packaged into small flasks and allowed to rest, as for attars. Due to the lack of carrier oil, ruhs are far more perishable than attars, and must be stored well away from the light. Ruhs are costly to produce and the number of materials that can be distilled into ruhs is limited. According to White Lotus Aromatics, these include jasmine (all types), rosa damascena, kewra (screwpine flowers), and khus (wild vetiver roots).

End Note: The four building blocks of oil-based perfumery as I see them, are (1) traditional distilled attars, (2) Middle-Eastern mukhallats, (3) foundational essential oils such as oud oil and sandalwood oil, and (4) concentrated perfume oils. Here is a brief summary of the four categories:

Traditional distilled attars: The subject of this chapter. In contrast to its catch-all categorization today, the word attar originally referred to a specific method of production, and a tradition that was almost exclusively Indian. True attars are made through the slow, laborious process of hydro- or steam-distilling flower petals, herbs, exotic woods, and resins directly into a base of sandalwood oil.

Cover Image: Custom-designed by Jim Morgan.

[i]F. Aubaile-Sallenave, Encyclopædia Iranica, Vol. III, Fasc. 1, pp. 14-16; available online at http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/atr-perfume (accessed online, 14 December 2017).

[ii] Based on 120ml of hydro-distilled motia attar costing $650 on White Lotus Aromatics

[iii] L’Inde des Parfums by Nicolas de Barry & Laurent Granier, published by Éditions du Garde-Temps, ISBN: 2-913545-33-5, 2004.

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Attars & CPOs The Attar Guide

The Attar Guide: Some words to the wise

29th October 2021

One big misconception I have come across while exploring the world of oil-based perfumery concerns purity. Attars, mukhallats, oud oils, and concentrated perfume oils (CPOs) are, technically speaking, pure perfumes because they do not contain alcohol or stabilizers. However, many people have interpreted the moniker ‘pure perfume’ to mean that attars are botanically pure or even all-natural.

Forget that, please. Although this may still be the case for traditionally-distilled Indian attars made in a deg and bhapka, it is certainly not true for most modern Indian ‘attars’, dupe oils, and Middle-Eastern mukhallats. And when it comes to American indie perfume oils or the big luxury niche perfume oil producers, you may be certain that they are composed using as precise a formula of synthetics and naturals as a commercial perfume.

The term for a blend of synthetics and naturals in any perfume formula is mixed media. Most oil-based perfumes on the market are actually mixed media perfumes. If you visualize all oil-based perfumery as a pie chart, a sliver of the pie represents the traditionally-distilled attars and artisanal ouds, the largest portion of the pie represents mixed media perfumes, and a modest but sizeable wedge represents the all-synthetic oil perfumes, which are the dupes, cheapies, and drugstore roll-ons.

Many people are surprised to hear that attars and mukhallats can and do contain synthetics. It goes against the exotic image that these perfumes enjoy. But in fact, modern Indian attar makers and Middle-Eastern perfume companies are as enthusiastic consumers of synthetic aromachemicals as any other segment of the fragrance industry. One attar company, Swiss Arabian, is so-called because of its fondness for, and patronage of, Givaudan, the massive Swiss company that supplies a broad range of synthetics, natural raw materials, and flavorings to the food and fragrance industries.

Therefore, while it is true that pure oud oils and traditional Indian attars do not contain aromachemicals synthesized in laboratories, most modern attars, mukhallats, and concentrated perfume oils do. Even some of Amouage’s world-famous and now sadly discontinued attars contained, to varying degrees, synthetics. Indeed, considering how heavy or muddy all-natural compositions can be, many are improved by them. Lift, space between molecules, expansiveness – these are all things afforded by synthetic aromachemicals.

Try not to let this bother you. The ‘clean beauty’ trend in cosmetics and fragrance, coupled with the mold-on-a-wall blooming of pseudoscience on the Internet (promoted and perpetuated by cynical influencers), has imbued words such as ‘natural’ and ‘synthetic’ with a largely irrational, emotive power that transcends the facts to become a strange brew of personal values, beliefs, or branding.

It has often been said but bears repeating anyway: ‘synthetic’ does not equal ‘bad’, just as ‘natural’ does not equal ‘good’. Arsenic is a natural that, I think we can agree, should never make it into a face mask or a suppository. (Cross all fingers and toes that not even Gwyneth Paltrow is that dopey). Atorvastatin, the drug my husband takes to control his high cholesterol, is a life-saver – and entirely synthetic. Unfortunately, with the rise of pseudoscience in the cosmetics arena, words like ‘synthetic’ and ‘chemical’ have become the C words of modern parlance. Given that everything we consume and see, and touch is made up of chemicals (air, water, etc.), including, of course, the very products touted as ‘clean beauty’, this is all very stupid indeed.

Readers will surely have their own feelings on the issue of naturals versus synthetics, but unless you are sensitive to a particular synthetic aromachemical that makes you want to tear your own skin off with your teeth, there is no reason for this to become the ideological hill you die on. What we can agree to do is to assign the words ‘synthetic’ and ‘chemical’ a negative value only when there is a nasty aftertaste to a perfume, or an awkward edge that denotes poor or clumsy use of a synthetic. For example, I am particularly sensitive to Ambroxan, a synthetic ambergris replacer. When massively overdosed in a composition, as in Dior Sauvage, all I smell is musky, radiant pain. Yet, when sensitively dosed, or tucked away into a far off corner of the fragrance, as in Eau Duelle eau de parfum (Diptyque), I find it lovely – like cold, juniper-scented air.

In other words, synthetics are a bit like children in that there are no bad children, only bad parents (i.e., some perfumers, the brands who set the briefs for perfumers, but also, to be fair, market trends that must be catered to, such as the depressingly modern demand for perfumes so strong and so radiant that you can taste them in the back of your throat)[i]. Synthetics and naturals are simply inert materials, sitting there waiting to be animated into something by a perfumer. In the reviews section, therefore, if I say that an oil smells synthetic, understand that I am not attaching any value judgment to the use of synthetics versus naturals but rather to its dosage in a blend or a lack of finesse in blending. That is all.

Note that the issue of natural versus synthetic perfumery is generally not as important to consumers in India and the Middle-East as it is in the West. In the Middle-East, consumers are generally more concerned with what the finished perfume smells like than with the naturalness or purity of each of the ingredients. They like perfume to smell amazing and strong, and the devil may care what makes it so. Many customers in the United Arab Emirates, for example, place a premium on oudy mukhallats smelling convincingly of Indian (Hindi) oud and are not overly concerned about the blending or stretching out with other oils that needs to occur for this to be economically feasible.

Likewise, in India today, young men and women are increasingly apt to choose lighter, Western-style oil perfumes made in the modern manner, i.e., with lots of synthetics to achieve an effect that runs as close as possible to the original designer perfumes that lie outside of their financial reach. Indeed, traditional distilled attars and ruhs are rather unpopular among young Indians, because they are viewed as old-fashioned, heavy, or too ‘Indian-smelling’.

Some real talk, though. The higher the price for any attar or mukhallat, the better the raw ingredients are likely to be. There is a much higher correlation between price and quality in attar and mukhallat perfumery than in Western commercial perfumery. The further we climb past a certain price point – say a hundred dollars per tola – the more likely it is that the oud or rose or jasmine or ambergris featured in the perfume will be real. And as the price climbs, so too does the quantity of the expensive raw material used in the blend.

Given the extraordinary cost of raw materials such as pure jasmine oil, oud, or ambergris, this is just common sense. A ‘pure sandal’ attar costing ten dollars for three milliliters will not be real Indian sandalwood, but rather a mix of modern sandalwood replacer synthetics such as Ebanol or Javanol blended with a non-Santalum album oil. But the sandalwood used in a sample of mitti attar that costs approximately twenty-five dollars for one millimeter is assuredly real sandalwood from the Mysore region of India.

Some high-end attars, mukhallats, and CPOs are all-natural, and some are mixed media. Sometimes, there is no way of telling. One possible indicator is the ‘perfumey-ness’ of an oil. The more perfumey an oil is, the more likely it is that synthetic materials have been used to achieve lift or volume, or an abstract quality. Often there will be a trace of something to round out a blend, lend a tactile quality (muskiness, smokiness, etc.). Either way, the only impact the use of synthetics should have on your personal wearing experience is how expertly (or otherwise) they have been used in the overall blend.

Beware the masking power of exoticism. Western consumers tend to regard anything Arabian-looking as ‘exotic’ and therefore intrinsically superior to anything we can buy locally. But there is as much cheap, shoddily-made crap on the Arabian perfume oil market as there is on the shelves of your local department store. The more you smell, the more you know. In the meantime, try to resist being blinded by the romance of those dinky, gold-topped tola bottles or anything in Arabic script. ‘Exoticism’, or perceived exoticism, is not in and of itself a meaningful harbinger of quality.

Lastly, a word to the wise on the issue of market segmentation. Most big Indian and Emirati perfume companies segment their market by income and social class, and then make perfumes to cater to each of those segments, as happy to make perfume oils for the lowly clerk as for Sheikhs. Therefore, it is not unusual to find something as beautiful and costly as Ajmal’s Mukhallat Dehn al Oud Moattaq – priced at three hundred dollars for seventeen millimeters – rubbing shoulders with the same company’s Al Wisal, a trashy synthetic rose oud you can pick up for twenty dollars. Arabian Oud, Abdul Samad al Qurashi, Ajmal, Al Haramain, Rasasi et al produce a broad range of perfume oils to suit every pocketbook and social class. Buy what you can afford and use price (as well as this Attar Guide) to help you find your comfort level.

Naturally, a bit of common sense is called for too. Don’t expect, for example, an oud-based oil in the lower brackets of a company’s catalogue to contain much in the way of real oud. Due to its rarity and cost, it is just not financially feasible to use real oud in a perfume that costs thirty dollars. However, an oud mukhallat in the higher-priced ranges of a company’s catalogue, costing upwards of a hundred dollars per tola, will contain a quantity of the real thing.

A few companies avoid this ‘all sizes catered to’ strategy, choosing instead to throw their weight at one single market segment. This includes Amouage, the prestigious Omani firm that focuses on a Westernized luxury segment of the market to the exclusion of all else, and, at the other end of the scale, Surrati, which seems to have entirely thrown its lot in with the cheap dupes and generic perfume oil ‘types’. In the American indie perfume oil sector, brands are all gunning for the same customer segment, which is mostly price-inflexible young women with an anti-mainstream bent, who are generally unwilling to pay over forty dollars for a five milliliter bottle of oil.

Cover Image: Custom-designed by Jim Morgan.

[i] An exception to this ‘no bad child’ rule might be Norlimbanol, a brutal woody synthetic that smells like eggy farts trapped in a rubber glove. This one should have been drowned at birth.

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