Cambodi Qadeem

At heart, all essential oils and extracts are attempts to capture the soul of a fragrance found in nature, a scent emitted by a tangible thing out in the wild; something you can touch.

Some of these you can experience with ease – to smell rose, put your nose in the flower. Others take a bit more effort… you usually need to peel the bark to smell pine gum, wait for frankincense resin to ooze out, dig for roots, or go for a swim to reach the water lilies.

In the case of agarwood, there are no shortcuts to experience the olfactory bliss stuck inside the heartwood itself.

We often forget this. We forget the incredible lapse of time necessary for agarwood resin to even exist, never mind harden enough to let you capture the smell of Kambodi 1976. The blood, sweat, and toil required to find the trees and unearth the resin. We often forget the source of it all – that it takes tons of lotus petals to produce only a tiny bit of oil; that you require kilos upon kilos of agarwood that took decades upon decades to mature to distill a single bottle of oud oil.

What you see here are olfactory diamonds. It was harvests like these that gave Cambodian oud its fame and inspired collectors to get their hands on every last chip that came from this land. If oud like this still exists today, it hasn’t been found. The past decades were spent scouring for the likes of it, leaving no stone unturned, and big dollars backing the hunt…

Some collect agarwood from lesser-known jungles and provinces, but when I hear of any vintage batch of Cambodian, Vietnamese, or Indian oud… my heart starts to race. These ‘popular’ names were the first regions to face extinction and also the jungles that gave birth to the most insane chunks of agarwood ever.

Long gone and far from what’s available today, these Cambodian nuggets are a glimpse back in time about half a century. So, you’re holding a different era between your fingers. For this reason alone, to me, they’re almost too precious to touch. I still think twice before shaving off a sliver to heat – and often, I don’t!

Look at recent wild harvests from Cambodia:

These ‘soft’ strains have many years more to go before even approaching the high-grade maturation of these irreplaceable relics:

It’s a type of insanity, I know. Anyone who is moved by and feels their dopamine peak from a first-hand encounter with something so precious can’t explain it. It’s a passion, an attraction you can’t pull yourself away from. That’s how I am when I see incredible pieces of agarwood. You can’t resist the pull of being awed by them. Even just seeing pictures. As for actually flipping a piece of these over in my palm… it’s game over.

Bigger pieces may be more impressive, but smaller ones mean the same (in fact, they’re usually from the same tree) and can have the same mesmerizing moment of zen you feel when holding a blue sapphire.

But aside from owning a piece of agarwood history, it’s the Kodo value that makes these pieces what they are. To inhale wafts of old Cambodi oud, that lush red sweetness gently bitter, is a privilege very few share. It’s this smell that made Oud Cambodi, Oud Cambodi. 

*This batch contains different sized pieces, made up into 10gr and 20gr packets.