Amouage's Silver Oud
Let’s workshop my little report, to be included in the fragrance section of my webpage, about the staple cypriol-oud fragrance in my collection: Amouage's Silver Oud
Silver Oud
Introductory Remarks
Several in the fragrance community worry that Amouage’s current creative director, Renaud Salmon, might be too business-minded to continue taking the creative risks of his predecessor Christopher Chong (a singer and student of philosophy who pivoted his life trajectory to become the beloved Steve Jobs of Amouage). I do not know enough about Salmon’s releases to say how well he has continued Chong’s bold legacy. Some comments he has made suggest a prioritization of mass appeal (commercial attention that I always worry, whether in music or poetry or whatever, will plummet artistry to Taylor-Swift lows), and his having pumped out a lot of releases in a short span (which I worry is an approach of “Let’s throw shit at the wall and see what sticks”)—those sorts of things give me pause. But I know that people like drama (wanting things to complain about to give their lives purpose). I also know that people tend not to like change, hence the phenomenon of fans getting mad at a band for not simply repeating the formula of their "Light My Fire" hits. Most importantly, I know that—however much flack releases like Lineage and Search and Purpose have received for being dull and unmemorable—two of my more prized Amouage bottles are boundary-pushing releases under Salmon: (a) Opus XIV (Royal Tobacco), a scent that might just beat out my full-bottle favorites from Chong (Jubilation 25, Memoir Man, Journey Man), and (b) Opus XIII (Silver Oud), which is the focus of the present discussion.
Silver Oud, like Royal Tobacco, was created by one of my favorite perfumers: Cécile Zarokian, who, in large part because of some excellent PR work (Nishane had pumped many free bottles into the shallow hype machine of YouTube influencers), continues to be celebrated for her 2019 release of Ani (a fragrance that I actually do not much enjoy). Silver Oud, boundary-pushing enough to get the approval of someone like Chong and to quiet—even if only momentarily—the most virulent of Salmon naysayers, is such a hypnotic stunner in my book. Deeply rooted in classic (one might say “masculine”) perfumery yet refreshingly innovative in its incorporation of modern ingredients and tastes, Silver Oud is a bottle-worthy win for anyone who appreciates complex, dark, and smoky compositions.
I like my perfume like I like my music: virtuosity, vision, and meaning prioritized over appeal, sales, and the ability to drop panties. Silver Oud scratches that itch with an intensity matched by few. Unlike the glut of commercial dreck kowtowing to the lowest common denominator, this release has too much style—and boat-rocking style at that (think: Basquiat parading through some Idaho Kmart in the 1980s)—to enjoy universal appeal. But this is saying too little. It fails to differentiate Silver Oud from various other niche offerings (whether the honeyed Naxos by Xerjoff, on the one extreme of wearability, to the animalic Afrika Olifant by Nishane, on the other). While undeniably art in a bottle and more reined in to an “elegant” balance (at least in comparison to schizoid compositions like Nishane’s Unutamam), Silver Oud takes a challenging enough stand to cause division even among the nerdiest frag heads. And for reasons that will become clear, the challenge I feel it poses is not merely sensual and social but psychological and existential.
Impressions
For the first ten seconds, in that fleeting space where most other perfumes burn off their isopropyl, Silver Oud hits the nose with straight manure, compost dung—the type scattered around fruit trees—churned with the nutrient-rich soil that gets under fingernails digging for earthworms. The in-your-face fecality (a function perhaps of the oud’s first reactions to air) is not as bad as it seems since it never really is fresh pile of shit still at body temperature, but rather shit on the verge of being indiscernible from the earth in which it is mixed. Although the manure impression quickly dissipates (pretty much a universal sigh of relief), it does set the earthy-animalic tone for the fragrance’s entire life (one of the longest lives in my collection of decants and bottles). For better or worse, that divisive aroma that marks the opening’s rapid expansion—old animal scat no doubt reinforced by the ambergris-like ambrarome and the Unutamam-reminiscent castoreum and patchouli—can always be distantly recalled if you really dig for it.
Against the alluring foundation of wormy soil reclaiming organic and inorganic matter alike—even Newport butts (and I say Newports because the cigarette-lit-in-a-full-ashtray presence, mainly a function of the ambrarome and guaiac wood and birch, does seem slightly mentholated)—the star ingredient wastes no time making its appearance: cypriol (nagarmotha), here used to bolster an oud impression of the real oud at the base and which really starts to shine an hour in: Assam agarwood. Silver Oud has been, at least in my short fragrance journey, one of the finest examples of cypriol use in perfumery—a paradigm reference for this note, much like Sultan Vetiver is in the case of vetiver. Now take that cypriol, with its root-like and dry-woods facets, and add in Virginia cedar and a thick patchouli (somewhat reminiscent of vintage masculines like Balenciaga Pour Homme). Add in as well what seems to my inexperienced nose to be what links it again to Unutamam: pine tar (or maybe it is just the smoky and tarry birch). Such an intermingling evokes a smoky-forest atmosphere: bonfire-smoked clothing as well as charred conifers (cones, needles, wood) sticky with fir balsam and moldering—many (most?) portions so dank in crumbly rot, in fact, as to be nearly indiscernible from the undergirding soil itself. The image is clear and never really changes throughout the life of the fragrance: earth reclaiming its own (no, not just trees but even us) in a liminal space between life and death.
All the notes in Silver Oud are bent to the dark side. We might think of it as Amouage’s Interlude Man, which also has an animalic oud, stripped of the fresh oregano and everything else except what is dark. The pine does give some suggestion of light. But even needles still somewhat green, say from a Christmas tree dumped in the woods weeks back after having caught fire, smolder in embers on which shovels of dirt are being tossed. I cannot deny that the vanilla-birch-guaiac trifecta gives Silver Oud a sweet appeal that stands out especially from a distance, away from the smoke-bomb many get from nose right to skin. The sweetness comes across as fruity when experiencing the scent holistically at a range. It is the fruitiness that people first mention as I pass by. Smelling my son, a frequent victim of my sprays, as we walked through a parking lot, I got that impression too: a muddle of fruits (perhaps sour jackfruit and raspberry, so I might try to bullshit myself). But here is the thing. Even if at one point in its imaginative past Silver Oud was Sospiro’s Erba Pura, Rome at present is no more. Now most of the peaches, apples, strawberries, figs, plums, pears, and whatnot are rotting well past the boozy stage of fermentation. And what fruit remains yet to become the excrement of earthworms, even if it happens to retain a hint of color, is too saturated with musky animalics to be called bright in any straightforward sense.
But what about that vanilla? Could that be the one exception to the otherwise ubiquitous darkness? A touch of Madagascar vanilla is definitely discernible. And in conjunction with the cedarwood does connect Silver Oud to Zarokian’s widely-appealing—and much brighter and fresher—Ani. But while the vanilla tempers perhaps an otherwise overly harsh and smoky composition (working with the ambrarome to yield an impression of sweetened coffee), it would be wrong to say that the vanilla, somewhat chocolatey and creamy in both creations, is like a subtle touch of pink (a bracelet, a sock fringe) on a goth girl. First, and to address specifically the pink point, the 80s ashtray impressions—let alone the leathery-musky-molasses animalics from the castoreum and the ambrarome—never leave the vanilla’s side, the vanilla charred and gripped by soil like everything else anyway. Second, and now to address the goth point, the darkness of Silver Oud is not a romantic-supernatural darkness like we get in Burton’s Sleepy Hollow or Fleming’s The Craft. Terenzi’s Laudano Nero, a labdanum masterpiece (and favorite in my collection), is more that kind of scent. Whereas Laudano Nero connotes a midnight forest that is alive (with perhaps a bonfire in the distance around which frolic demon-teat-sucking witches), Silver Oud connotes a forest of sobering death and decay. Even the ambery coziness that envelops me deep into the dry down feels a bit like funeral shovels of dirt. Silver Oud, in short, is an existential darkness. It is not the darkness of the dramatic fantasies we concoct in part to distract ourselves from the true darkness. It is an existential darkness from which no blanket over the face can ever shelter us, the darkness of reality itself: death and decay swallowing all of us into sublivion, all the witches and demons of our fantasies included. It is like when people say they are dark and goth and all that, and then I show up walking the walk (even if lacking mascara and deadpan affect, even if wearing a lime green shirt)—show up with poems of holds-no-punches existentialism, poems premised upon a rejection of our separateness from the rest of nature, poems spotlighting hurricane-and-infant-pound-town terrors they find too creepy (poems, although as dark as the soil, function as silver-glinting soul mirrors polished enough for the triggered little Wednesday Addams privileged cunts to run to administrators to see me purged from my academic post).
Like so many Amouage releases (Epic Man comes right to mind for how it transports me right to camel caravans of spice-trading Bedouins), the scenery Silver Oud evokes is high resolution and coherent: charred wood and roots, and even the flesh of flora and fauna, in the transition back to dank soil—imagery that cannot but bring into starkest relief the mortality of all earthly critters. Deep in the dry down the fruity amber becomes light and graceful enough to suggest to the imagination the promise that life will bloom again. But that only serves to repeat the cycle and serves as the condition of the possibility for more moldering to come—and can only invite the question of why?
We have on our hands, as I see it, a woody-ambery memento mori of a fragrance characterized by charred pine and animalic vanilla, musky-smokey-tarlike leather of the ambrarome and birch and castoreum, and a somewhat camphoric oud—a stellar oud outmatched only by tier-one hitters like Bortnikoff’s various oud creations or from Areej Le Dore Russian Oud. Whereas Journey Man (another Amouage favorite in my collection) is a clearly—with its sizzling Sichuan pepper and tobacco and frankincense—a fire bender scent, Silver Oud—with its smoky woods and dank patchouli following an opening of straight manure—is indubitably the scent of earth benders. It is easy to imagine this as King Bumi’s scent. I think of this as the scent not of Arthur or Lancelot or Gawain but of Percival, whose connection to nature and the earth makes him the only knight pure enough and free enough of externally-driven ambition to approach the Holy Grail. Perhaps better yet, I think of this as the scent not of Saruman the White but of Radagast the Brown, depicted as so one with the earth that he is literally losing his mind and sense of individuation (mushrooms, in fact, growing all over him even as he lives).
At first blush, the mortality-rotting imagery I get from the scent might not seem to harmonize with the literary influence behind Silver Oud. How am I getting all this darkness and death from a perfume inspired by Stendhal's The Red and the Black, a novel about a man (Julien Sorel) who struggles to reconcile his drive to oblige social expectations and climb social ladders (whether by joining the military, the red, or the clergy, the black) and his drive to be authentic to himself regardless as to how that might weaken him in the eyes of others? It turns out that Stendhal’s 1830 novel does contain significant exploration of death. Death, a constant backdrop thrum to the frenzied ambitions of the characters, especially looms over the chronic obsession with what others think that leads Julien to shoot his lover—which, yes, he does for talking negatively about him to another man. Relevant to the more sober and scientific, the more earthly and grounded, horrors that Silver Oud directs our minds to, Stendhal describes Julien’s execution at the guillotine for his unsuccessful attempt in a matter-of-fact manner, emphasizing the inevitability and coldness of the process (which only heightens the key theme in the book: the existential dilemma of choosing one's path in a seemingly indifferent or absurd world).
So I do think that my impression hangs together, in the end, with Zarokian’s literary launching point. And in a way, wearing Silver Oud—a scent that is not meant to appease people and win people over, but rather an artistic statement of authenticity (however much, of course, a mere luxury product can be such a statement)—allows us to make a choose-your-own-adventure out of The Red and The Black, one where Julien through us refuses to kowtow to social conformity and build his life uncritically around the conventions into which he was born. Let me put the point another way. Fitting nicely with the moral of the novel, Silver Oud—shockingly artistic, challenging in its profile and its imagery (and, as I see it anyway, its reminder that we are mere buds of the earth)—resists serving as a tool to inveigle yourself into the good graces of others. I feel that all fragrances should be worn, ultimately, for the wearer’s sake. Some niche perfumes are compliment-winners enough to allow you to think that is exactly what you are doing, even when you are not. Silver Oud, although not as starkly as Unutamam (the anti-panty-dropper), proves resistant to such tricks of self-deception.
Concluding Remarks
A fragrance of contrasts (smoky yet subtly sweet, animalic yet balanced, dark yet neither in a supernatural nor in a fashionable-goth way), Silver Oud is currently climbing into the top tier of my collection. At the time of writing this, I still prefer Zarokian’s Royal Tobacco (more of a Gandalf fragrance). Both scents belong to the same family, linked especially in the smoky guaiac wood and Christmas pine, but Royal Tobacco is more detailed and cigar sweet and alive whereas Silver Oud is drier, more daringly animalic and dead, and perhaps even more masculine bad boy (think of the coal miners as represented in the Netflix Chernobyl series). Aside from the captivating smell and intriguing imagery, and aside from the interesting mood it brings out of me, what keeps Silver Oud—the best-looking bottle in my collection, for what little that is worth—climbing on my list is the fact that it is, perhaps even more than Royal Tobacco, my most consistently Istvanian fragrance: polarizing, existential, raw and unfiltered, unabashedly naturalistic—perfect for an austere hermit like myself: raised in the mountains, made weird by mushrooms and solitude just like Radagast, and always ready to remind everyone of mortality and the transient nature of life.
Treble: Patchouli, Cypriol, Virginia Cedar
Mid: Assam Agarwood, Madagascar vanilla
Bass: Castoreum, Birch, Ambrarome, Guaiac wood