Amouage's Silver Oud (ROUND 2)

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

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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 “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 of his comments suggesting 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) have raised my eyebrows. His having pumped out a lot of releases in such a short span gives me pause as well: is this just an approach of “Let’s throw shit at the wall and see what sticks?” On the other hand, I know that people—myself included (what else are we to do to avoid the gaping chasm of our mortality?)—like drama, finding purpose and escape in bitching (so much, in fact, that fixing the problem often enough proves more harrowing than having the problem). I also know that people tend not to like change. The phenomenon of fans criticizing artists for evolving beyond their initial “Light My Fire” hits is well-documented. Most importantly, I know that—however much flack releases like Lineage and Search and Purpose have received for being unmemorable—two of my more prized Amouage bottles are boundary-pushing releases under Salmon: (a) Opus XIV (Royal Tobacco), an award-winning scent that might just beat out my full-bottle favorites from Chong’s era (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, is the creation of Cécile Zarokian, a perfumer 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). Boundary-pushing enough to quiet—even if only momentarily—the most virulent of Salmon naysayers, Silver Oud thoroughly demonstrates her versality and skill. It is a hypnotic stunner that surely wins Chong’s quiet approval. Deeply rooted in classic perfumery of the West and the oud-heavy tradition of the East, yet refreshingly innovative in its incorporation of modern ingredients and tastes, Silver Oud stands as a bottle-worthy achievement. Even those who dislike like such dark and smokey compositions will not deny the respectable skill reflected here.

I like my perfume like I like my music: prioritizing virtuosity, vision, and meaning over mass appeal, sales figures, or power to drop panties. Silver Oud scratches that itch with an intensity matched by few others. Unlike the glut of commercial dreck pandering to the lowest common denominator, this release possesses too much style—and boat-rocking style at that (think: Basquiat sauntering through some Idaho Kmart in the 1980s)—to enjoy universal appeal. This is saying too little, of course. 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). Undeniably olfactory art in a bottle and yet more balanced in comparison to schizoid compositions like Nishane’s Unutamam, Silver Oud takes a stance challenging enough to divide even the nerdiest frag heads. And for reasons that will become clear, the challenge it poses goes beyond the sensual and social. Its confrontational oomph extends even into psychological and metaphysical territories.

Impressions

For the first ten seconds—you know, in that fleeting space of isopropyl burn off—Silver Oud hits the nose with manure, dung churned with the nutrient-rich soil that gets under fingernails digging for earthworms. The in-your-face fecality, a function perhaps of the almost-rubbery oud’s first reaction with air, is less off-putting than it might sound. It never reads, after all, as shit in the form of steaming plops on the kitchen tile but rather shit in the form of rank compost scattered around fruit trees. Although the manure sensation quickly dissipates, it does set the earthy-animalic tone of the fragrance’s impressively long life (lasting weeks and week on clothing like Nasomatto’s Duro). For better or worse, that divisive aroma marking merely the fragrance’s inflationary epoch—old animal scat reinforced by the ambergris-like ambrarome and the Unutamam-reminiscent castoreum-patchouli combo—remains a subtle undercurrent detectable (even if only in fantasy) if you really dig for it. (And is it really that bad anyway to dig for it, when it can so powerfully evoke feelings of nostalgia for childhood trips to the zoo or for family activities based around farming and gardening and animal husbandry? Is it really that bad when we are addicted to sniffing our ass fingers? “No one knows when the hand goes when the door’s closed.”)

Against the alluring foundation of fertile soil reclaiming organic and inorganic matter alike—even Newport cigarette butts (and I specifically say “Newports” because the vibe of cigarette lit in a full ashtray, 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 Assam oud at the base. 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 patchouli—the patchouli oil, not merely steam distilled by molecularly distilled (the difference, roughly, between carbon filtration and reverse-osmosis filtration), somewhat reminiscent of vintage masculines like Balenciaga Pour Homme. Add in as well what seems to my nose to be what links it again to Unutamam: pine tar (or maybe it is just the tarry and burnt birch). Such an intermingling evokes vivid wilderness-like impressions: bonfire-smoked clothing, charred conifers (cones, needles, wood) sticky with fir balsam and moldering—most of it so dank in its crumbly rot as to be nearly indiscernible from the undergirding soil. The grave-sucking image of liminality never really changes throughout the life of the fragrance: earth reclaiming its own—no, not just trees but even us—in a transitional zone between life and death.

All notes in Silver Oud bend to the dark side. We might think of it as Amouage’s Interlude Man, stripped of the oregano and leaving the animalic oud and only the shadowy elements. So many other dark and woody and ambery fragrances do a bit of foreplay: some sort of fruit (citrus typically) or flowers to bait us into the hole-prolapsing session to come, something that makes us less likely to kick and scream as the periphery of black grows with the tightening of the chokehold. But Silver Oud is unapologetic. It goes right for the throat and right up—not in, but up (penitentiary-style)—the ass pipe.  

The pine does give some suggestion of light. I do admit that. But even needles still somewhat green—say, from a Christmas tree dumped in the woods weeks back (of course, after having caught fire)—smolder in embers on which shovels of dirt are being tossed. I cannot deny that the vanilla-birch-guaiac trifecta lends a sweet appeal that stands out especially from a distance. The sweetness, which can be more of a burnt-marshmallow smoke bomb with nose smackdab to skin, comes across from a more panoptic range as fruity. It is a fruitiness that people first mention as I pass by, despite the profile pyramid might suggest. 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 (raspberry and perhaps even sour jackfruit, 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, that Rome has long since fallen. Now most of the peaches, apples, strawberries, figs, plums, pears, and whatnot are disindividuating in a decay beyond the boozy stage of fermentation. And what fruit remains yet to become earthworm excrement—yes, even if retaining a hint of color—is too saturated with musky animalics to be called bright in any conventional sense.

But what about that vanilla? Could that be the one exception to the otherwise ubiquitous darkness? Madagascar vanilla is definitely discernible, but neither loud nor gourmand even in conjunction with the chocolately and almost cardamom-like patchouli. The vanilla-cedarwood combo does connect Silver Oud to Zarokian’s widely-appealing, and much brighter and fresher, Ani. The Ani resemblance was an immediate impression (after the manure hit, of course) and, not being a fan of Ani, a worrisome reservation—but one I quickly got over. (Is it now time to revisit Ani?) But while the vanilla, working with the ambrarome to yield an imprint of sweetened coffee, tempers perhaps an otherwise overly harsh and smoky composition, 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 an otherwise attitudinal goth girl. First, and to address specifically the pink point, the 80s ashtray intimations—let alone the leathery-musky 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 a favorite in my collection), is more that kind of scent. Whereas Laudano Nero connotes a midnight forest alive with gnarled branches (and in the distance perhaps a bonfire around which frolic demon-teat-sucking witches), Silver Oud connotes a forest of sobering death and decay. That forest is sometimes black like Laudano Nero, no doubt. But it is more often an overcast gray—and yes, sometimes sun blasts through the trees. Even the ambery coziness that envelops me in the dry down is animalic in its warmth and feels almost like funeral shovels of dirt—and funerals take place, of course, almost never after sunset.

So do not get the darkness here confused. Silver Oud is an existential darkness: the kind that can find you even on beach vacations; the kind that, even in a padded cell of 24/7 fluorescence, reaches you not just from the cold black vacuum of outer space or from the incinerating light of our life-giving sun but even from private nooks so inward they are unknown even to ourselves. It is not the darkness of the dramatic fantasies we concoct in part to divert our gaze from real shadows. It is a sober darkness from which no blanket over the face can shelter us, the darkness of reality itself: death and decay swallowing all into sublivion, all the witches and demons and christs of our fantasies included.

It is like when people claim to embrace darkness, wrapping themselves in the chic aesthetics and affectations of goth culture (black jeans and corsets and makeup, combat boots and vampire lace, vocal fry of indifference), and then I show up ready to walk the walk and fist the GG-Alin fist—yes, even if I lack the requisite mascara and deadpan affect, even if wear a lime green t-shirt and a neon yellow fanny pack. They talk all this macabre radicality from the safe-space confines of Hot Topic and then I show up with gospels from the untamed wilderness beyond their zones of Disney satanism: poems of holds-no-punches rejection of our separateness from the rest of nature; poems spotlighting hurricane-and-infant-pound-town terrors these self-stylized “boundary pushers” find too creepy, too “triggering,” “activating” of their cPTSD; poems, although as dark as the soil, that function as silver-glinting soul mirrors so polished that these privileged little Wednesday Addams cunts—their bluff called, their chic pretension faltering—scurry 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 to my mind: 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 animalic life will bloom again. But we all know what more life means: more moldering to come—a churning cycle that eventually, for anyone seeing it again and again (even if through nature documentaries on the reams and reams locust death) 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 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 an earth-bender scent. It is easy to imagine this as King Bumi’s odor. I think of this as the odor 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 odor 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—literal mushrooms, in what add imagistic emphasis to the point, growing all over him even as he lives.

At first blush, the mortality-rotting imagery I get from Silver Oud might not seem to harmonize with the literary influence Zarokian says inspired it. The Red and the Black, after all, is mainly just 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. That, in my mind, only heightens the key theme in the book: the existential dilemma of choosing one’s path in a seemingly indifferent or absurd world.

I do think that my account hangs together, in the end, with Silver Oud’s literary source. And if allow myself to stretch further into flights of fancy (which writing about perfumes, such a subjective arena, allows me the breath of fresh aldehydes to do), wearing Silver Oud connects to the novel in a more active way: it allows us to choose a different path than Julian. For being a scent not meant to appease and win people over but rather an avant-garde statement of authenticity (however much—not to sound like those laughably bogus commercials linking Coca-Cola consumption with standing above the crowd—a mere luxury product can ever be such a statement), wearing Silver Oud means refusing to kowtow to social conformity and refusing to build our lives uncritically around the conventions into which we are 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—when you like and where you like (with due consideration, of course, for the comfort of others, which requires an understanding of the strength and connotations of the fragrance). Some artistic offerings from niche houses (think Herod or Naxos) 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 ultimate 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—potent despite being on the lower end of oil concentration compared to the other Amouages I know—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

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