Black Kinam

Green, yellow, purple, white…

—Black.

Is it the scent profile, how bitter it is, how hard it numbs your tongue – if it numbs your tongue – the color of the oil, the color of the resin, the color of the kyen? Is it the texture, or the psychoactive effects on your mind?

What makes kinam kinam?

When, lifetimes ago, an extra-special strain of agarwood was first dubbed ‘kinam’ (or kyara), it was only the beginning. In fact, the wood in question didn’t even have to be agarwood!

Those initial forays into a newfound… and exceptionally hard-to-find fragrance were exploratory. The descriptions were vague – ‘a little bitter, a little bit sweet’ – because, like describing the taste of honey to one who has yet to taste it, the descriptions were almost irrelevant. 

To grasp it at all, honey must be tasted. Kinam must be smelled.

We’ve come a long way. Over the centuries, generations of scent-obsessed connoisseurs discovered, not new, but rather nuanced dimensions of what they knew as ‘kinam’.

For some of the fragranauts, the term transcends terroir – kinam isn’t limited to Japan. And they noticed the wood had different hues, physically and scentually, which eventually brought us the different color grades you know today.

Kinam was still kinam, but no longer just kinam. I’ve seen red oil kyara that was literally red in color. Green oil kyara that was green. Black oil that was black…..

Where Kyara LTD and Nha Trang dived into the red and blue-green spectrums of kyara and White Kinam shoots for the bright, this perfume goes noir. 

Imagine the signature less-sour, more-saccharine profile of black kinam oozing out of and into and over and under a flush of ripe figs and wet mangoes topped with a splash of petitgrain and crushed black pepper. Tobacco in the air. Oakmoss on the trees as wafts of brewed coffee blow by. 

I put together a marriage of (sticky) cypress and (even stickier) immortelle, imbued that with cade, and then injected the melange with the potent noir power of one of my most prized and irreplaceable ouds: Black Kinam. 

The oleo-oudiness of raw black Malinau agarwood resin, the exalting zest of Vietnamese musk, and the salty sheen of vintage black ambergris that make up the carrier not only complements the majestic BK oud, it also gives the oud a diffusive boost when you take a spritz.

If you’ve never gotten your nose wet, your head spiked, your olfactory mashed up in order to reveal a scent you never knew existed, then this sure is a spritz that’ll paint it all with K’s black.

Limited.

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