Beginner perfumer · 63
"Rename Pretty Oud to Shitty Oud" — the eight people arguing are not arguing about the same thing
· 22 min read
Somebody on r/DIYfragrance complained that Firmenich's Pretty Oud is marketed as a gentle oud with no animalic facets and is in fact the most faecal-smelling thing they have encountered. Five of the eight replies disagreed, and one of them supplied the key: he had exactly the same experience neat, and at 1 percent it became pretty. I checked whether Pretty Oud is in the database. It is, filed under agarwood specialty, with no CAS number and an occurrence field reading not found in nature. That record has 41 suppliers; the record for actual agarwood oil has 26. Adding the 16 for the replacer, more than twice as many suppliers sell an oud-shaped thing as sell oud.
About a 6 minute read.
Seventeen hours ago:
"Pretty oud by Firmenich is marketed as a pretty, kind oud note with no animalic facets. Meanwhile it is the most poopie smelling thing ever. I bought from de kruiderie.
I am curious about your experiences with this raw material. I think the name and the marketing is very misleading and it has a ton of civet / other animalic caca note in there."
Five of the eight replies disagree:
"I disagree with you. I find it quite lovely. I assume you haven't smelled real oud if you think this smells 'poopie'" (ihavezeroanswersbro)
"How it smells on its own, full strength is largely irrelevant. In formulation, it lends a very pleasing western Oud effect even at relatively low doses." (CapnLazerz)
"To me, it smells mostly as leather. Animalic the way leather is but in no way fecal. And definitely not barnyard." (brabrabra222)
"It doesn't smell fecal or animalic at all. It smells amazing and could be a fragrance all on it's own." (ImJustWaySmarter)
And one supplied the key:
"I had the same experience in undiluted form, but when i diluted it to a 1% solution, this oud became pretty. I combined it in multiple combinations with vanilla, tobacco, veramoss and other ingredients to test what combinations make a beautiful harmonious composition." (hussellaza)
Same material, same experience, one variable different.
First, is it in the database
It is, and the answer is more interesting than expected.
Searching agarwood returns six records. One of them is agarwood specialty (#897), and its supplier product list contains this:
Azelis UK; BLACK AGAR 296985; Azelis UK; **PRETTY OUD**; BMV Fragrances; Oudh 13; Oudh 882; Oudh Adeem; Oudh Balai; Oudh Hamid; Oudh Mumtaz; ...
Pretty Oud is in there.
And that record's fields read:
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| CAS | none |
| Natural/synthetic | natural/synthetic |
| Occurrence | not found in nature |
| Assay | 99.00 to 100.00 |
| Suppliers | 41 |
It is not agarwood oil. It is a compounded base.
The poster is comparing it to "real oud", and ihavezeroanswersbro said he probably has not smelled real oud. The latter is more right than he knew.
Three tiers
Laying the six records out shows a clear stratification:
| Record | CAS | Suppliers | Natural/synthetic | Occurrence |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| agarwood oil #895 | 94350-09-1 | 26 | natural | Aquilaria wood |
| agarwood specialty #897 | none | 41 | natural/synthetic | not found in nature |
| agarwood oil replacer #901 | none | 16 | natural/synthetic | can be natural |
| agarwood oil (a different tree) #903 | 1333524-00-7 | 2 | natural | a different plant |
41 + 16 = 57 suppliers sell a base or a replacer; 26 sell the oil.
More than twice as many suppliers sell an oud-shaped thing as sell oud.
The odour fields separate them
The three odour fields differ, and where they differ is interesting:
| Odour field | |
|---|---|
| agarwood oil (the real one) | sweet, agarwood, woody, balsamic, sandalwood, leathery, fruity, smoky, animal, tobacco |
| agarwood specialty | agarwood, woody, vetiver, balsamic, animal, earthy, amber, spicy, smoky |
| replacer | woody, vetiver, sweet, balsamic, animal, earthy, amber, smoky |
Two things.
One: both the base and the replacer carry vetiver, and the real oil does not. Vetiver is the most-used skeleton for reconstructing an oud effect, so the word appearing in the compounded products and not in the natural oil makes sense.
Two: the replacer's odour field does not contain the word agarwood at all. Woody, vetiver, sweet, balsamic, animal, earthy, amber, smoky. An oud-shaped outline, rather than oud.
(brabrabra222 said Pretty Oud smells mostly of leather. Leathery sits in the real oil's field, not the specialty's. Whether that is his nose, his lot, or the field being too coarse, I cannot tell.)
What real agarwood is
It is not a plant material. It is a wound response.
The database's note on agarwood oil is explicit:
"This oil is water distilled from fungus infected wood of the tree Aquilaria Agallocha, growing in northeastern India."
Zhou and colleagues isolated three endophytic fungi from agarwood and analysed inoculated material by GC-MS in World J Microbiol Biotechnol in 2026. Across agarwood essential oils from different formation modes they identified 83 volatile metabolites, dominated by sesquiterpenes at 66.27% and chromones. Fungal inoculation significantly reshaped the profiles, particularly by increasing sesquiterpenes and chromones (p < 0.05).
Ma and colleagues went finer in Frontiers in Plant Science in 2026, using metabolomics and GC-MS to identify 14,784 metabolites, including 118 agarwood-characteristic sesquiterpene skeletons and 2-(2-phenylethyl)chromones.
118 skeletons. That is why a reconstitution is a different thing rather than a worse version of the same thing.
And the opening of the Ma paper carries a line that matters to buyers: natural agarwood formation is slow, and the quality of artificially induced agarwood remains unstable.
What the database says about itself
The agarwood oil record's odour description field carries this comment:
"Oud, fresh-woody, balsamic, animal-barnyard. This is the real thing, beautifully complex and incredibly lasting. It was almost certainly adulterated somewhat at source because almost all natural oud is."
I did not write that. It is a comment the database carries.
(How far natural materials vary in composition is measured in How much does a natural actually vary. Agarwood sits at the extreme of that spectrum.)
That variable
Back to the disagreement. Of eight people, exactly one mentioned concentration:
"I had the same experience in undiluted form, but when i diluted it to a 1% solution, this oud became pretty."
CapnLazerz was saying the other half of the same thing: "how it smells on its own, full strength is largely irrelevant."
Faecal concentrated and floral dilute is a well known phenomenon in aroma materials. I wrote about the mechanism, and about why not everybody turns the corner at the same concentration, in the indole article.
The poster bought a material, opened the bottle, smelled it neat, and judged it. And the database's own odour description for agarwood oil is tagged "at 100.00%" — even the database's description is of the neat material. That field carries no diluted version.
(Diluting on arrival rather than smelling neat came up once before, in the pyrazine article, where somebody thought his material had gone bad and was smelling it neat.)
One more buyer's trap
The sixth record is agarwood oil (aetoxylon sympetalum), CAS 1333524-00-7, 2 suppliers.
That is a different plant. Aetoxylon sympetalum is not Aquilaria. Locally it is called gaharu buaya, crocodile agarwood, and it is sometimes sold as "White Oud".
Its odour field: agarwood, aromatic, woody, umami, mossy, earthy, mushroom, smoky, animal.
Umami and mushroom do not appear in the real agarwood oil's field.
It has its own CAS, so it can be told apart on paper. Not by name.
What you can actually do
- Establish first whether you are buying oil, a base or a replacer. With a CAS (94350-09-1) it is the oil; without one it is a compounded product.
- A base is not an inferior oil; it is a different thing. CapnLazerz is right that it has its use in a formula, and judging it neat asks the wrong question.
- Dilute on arrival; do not smell it neat. For materials like this the neat verdict and the 1% verdict can be opposite.
- If you see White Oud, check the botanical name. Aetoxylon sympetalum and Aquilaria are two plants.
- Natural agarwood oil is compositionally unstable to begin with. The paper itself says artificially induced quality is unstable, and the database's own comment says almost all natural oud is adulterated.
- The odour fields are usable for cross-checking. The real oil carries sandalwood, leathery and tobacco; the base carries vetiver; the replacer does not carry the word agarwood at all.
What this doesn't establish
- I have not smelled any of them. This is database fields plus two papers.
- I have not established Pretty Oud's composition. What I established is that it appears in the supplier product list of the
agarwood specialtyrecord, and that this record has no CAS and an occurrence field reading not found in nature. A name in a supplier list does not mean that record's fields are that product's specification. - The odour fields are descriptions of those records, not a controlled comparison. Different evaluators, different years, not blind.
- "57 against 26" counts supplier entries. One company may sell more than one type; I did not deduplicate.
- I cannot attribute brabrabra222's "leather". It may be the lot, the nose, or the field being coarse.
- Zhou 2026 and Ma 2026 both studied artificially induced agarwood. Whether wild natural agarwood has the same compositional distribution, neither answers.
- "Almost all natural oud is adulterated" is a comment the database carries, not a fact I verified, and no proportion is given.
- The 1% figure comes from one forum comment, unreproduced, and I do not know what solvent was used.
- I did not run corpus statistics.