White Nirvana

This perfume is olfactory oud insanity. Composed around the White Kinam perfume rendition with loads of added oud in the form of Kyara Ketone, Borneo Kynam, Borneo Diesel, and Kalbar 3000…

To this day, I haven’t smelled an oud like Kalbar 3000, one of the most precious ouds ever distilled. I can hardly believe that it’s been seventeen years since we made it. As I’ll explain below, I unknowingly undersold an irreplaceable gem, so I jumped at the chance to buy it back some years after it was sold out…

If you could imagine holding your hands over a gently sizzling Brunei chip, you’d be amazed to find that it smells nothing like Kalbar 3000.

You’ll encounter an incomparable floral note which is seldom met with in the scent of burning oud chips. Its tangy, zesty top-notes are alive with a vibrancy and oomph non-existent in contemporary oud oils.

Unlike inert resin contained in oud wood, distilled oud oil has the ability to mature and age and attain a depth surpassing the scent of lifeless chips. That is the beauty of artisanal distillation. In this little bottle, you smell the very soul of the tree.

And not just any tree…

Had we not recklessly ground the precious Brunean agarwood and distilled this oil, you would have had the chance to own a handsome collection of Brunei kinam chunks. Not only does the same caliber wood we crushed up now sell for many-fold more (a kilo costs an added zero more today, running into the tens of thousands of dollars for a single kilogram), a sizable portion of the batch that went into the boiler was a fusion of chips from Brunei kinam producing trees, and what later emerged as Brunei kinam itself.

We found this out years after Kalbar 3000 sold out, when we wanted to distill a similar oil.

“With what wood? THIS? (pointing to our Brunei kinam — the same pieces we ground up all those years ago)”

That’s why I bought the oil back from a collector around seven years ago, and I’ve kept it untouched since then.

And that’s the end of the story. The end of an era for even thinking of making oud like this. That’s why no Brunei distilled today compares — can compare — to Kalbar 3000. And it’s why this is the first time in years that I’m using or mentioning this oud again – exclusively for this edition of White Nirvana – because of that tangy, zesty, pristine kinamic pitch that levels perfume up even more.