Kambodi X

Oud in the West has been pasteurized and homogenized and sugar coated to cater to the modern nose. Most of us who come to oud for the first time come from a scentscape that does not approve of oud! (Think back to the time you first smelled those funky Indian ouds, and you know what I mean.)

But it looks like there’s a minor renaissance happening.

Barn is actually making a comeback!

But here you’re not getting barn. This is the third in our Koh Kong trinity. And we saved the reddest, rawest one for last. I wanted to add something to the funk spectrum that's not barn — but gives you the same punch. A scent that doesn't smell fermented, but with no less oudy twang than a Hindi soaked for a month. Instead of barn, Kambodi X gives you raw. And boy oh boy, if you’re among the uninitiated, I don’t know which one whips your nose the hardest!

Kambodi X is Koh Kong to the bone. It means this oil packs a truck load of oud heavy oomph that’s raw, red, raw, red — . . .

Think freshly dyed leather. Think a cigar being freshly rolled. Wild flowers you smell as you walk on an unpaved pathway in the summer. That’s raw. 

Think musk. Think ambergris. Think the perfumer’s ‘exalting fixatives’, in the raw, then infused and beautified by the marriage with fresh cedar bark. Think Mr. Nhek’s Koh Kong well water. That’s red.  

So, you’re not getting barn. You're getting raw. You're getting red. You're getting a Cambodi that belongs in the 70’s. A grand daddy oud scent that’s so old school and soooo unlike the fruity generation it’s been defunct-ed by.

Take a break from the unripe berries and the cherries. Take a step back from those pasteurised ‘Cambodis’. Pack your rucksack and head to the red walled canyons, molasses crackling from a cowboy pipe at sunset. Red.