Jungle Kinam – Running Low

Swirling notes of vanilla and vetiver intertwine with the mineral-rich, oudy base of Tigerwood oud, grounded in mineral-rich basenotes. No citrus, no floral softness – just the quiet intensity of nature. A fragrance that evokes mountain hikes and winding road trips, forest camps and misty riverbanks.

Compared to the previous edition that sold out a few years ago, this brew revamps the oud facets both in terms of composition and concentration.

Artisanal Sumatran ouds are incredibly rare, and I rarely part with the ones we’ve made. Whenever they’ve been offered, they sold out rapidly. 

So, to use one of these precious distillations in a perfume, while ultimately reckless, is done with great care because it can take forever to gather enough high-grade materials to produce a pitifully small yield – alongside Marokean gyrinops, Sumatran agarwood is notorious for low yield distillations.

Despite the high cost and rarity, Sumatran oud is also perfect for a ‘jungle’ frag because of Sumatran ouds’ distinctively jungly profile. 

Sumatora Zen casts its cacao-like resinous glaze over a medley of rare floral-forest herbs, these ouds create a complexity you won’t find in even the most intensely herbal essential oils. 

Alongside Sumatora Zen, you’ve got the backbone of the original Jungle Kinam: Green Papua, which too is defined by that quintessential green jungle profile.

Where Sumatora is dense dark jungle, Green Papua is piercing incense, so when lavender leaves, sage, and mist-covered tea fields unfold beneath the rainy canopy of Papuan gyrinops – lush, forested, and pulsing with a deep, jungle-green intensity – you’d get wafts of Sumatra’s thick resin pulsing throughout. 

But the oud doesn’t stop there. 

Enter the grandaddy: Tigerwood. 

With its dark earthy depth, Tigerwood is held by many to be the jungle oud. West Malaysian ouds all share this inherently vibrant dark yet floral jungle beat, which adds an entirely new dimension to the Sumatran-Papuan duo it joins.

By now, your nose has cruised along the Amazon River and reached the clear with the sun-drenched scent of dry grass now surrounding you as you cruise through Central America with the top down, golden hills rolling endlessly with haystacks resting in their folds.

You trek north, feel the thick South American humidity wrap around you, cross the Caribbean, and let the scent of a tropical island linger in your memory.

And as you smell deeper, you encounter it…

If there’s an oud that’s even more dear to me than my Tigerwood or Sumatran marvel, it’s our vintage Penkanbaru distillation that I’ve never sold a single bottle of, and I’ve thus far intended to only use in special compositions. 

It’s not a jungly oud at all, which is the point – the way its soft berry profile adds a floral tone to the otherwise full-on jungle oud ensemble and gives the perfume the illusion of top heart notes which are in reality absent, but you’d never think it! 

Such an ensemble of oud refined with those auxilary notes creates a scent where Vietnamese woodlands meet the misty Scottish highlands, colliding with the untamed jungles of a remote Indonesian island and the golden fields of a summer afternoon in the French countryside.