Amouage's Silver Oud (ROUND 4)
Let’s workshop my little report, for the fragrance section of my webpage, about astaple cypriol-oud fragrance in my collection: Amouage's Silver Oud, a charred-wood oriental by Cécile Zarokian
scent of the day: Overture Man, by Amouage
Silver Oud
Introductory Remarks
Many enthusiasts of Amouage, an Omani pillar of niche perfumery, have grown uneasy under the stewardship of Renaud Salmon. The worry is that his business orientation, clear from some of his early maneuvers as creative director, might curtail the risk-taking that characterized the art-centered tenure of his predecessor, Christopher Chong—a former singer and philosophy student who pivoted his life trajectory to become the “Steve Jobs of Amouage.” Rumor of a partial buyout by the cosmetic harbinger of decline L’Oréal, where too many niche houses have met death under the ham-fisted hacks of its conglomerate scythes, have only fueled the uneasiness. How could it not when Mugler’s taxidermied corpse, now mall-friendly drivel for a Disneyfied globe, is still being marionetted around Macy’s by gaslighting empty suits neurotic about “hitting sales targets”?
Will Amouage be next? Discontinuations of gut-punching releases (as if by some reptilian agenda to cultivate a monocrop of mediocrity whose members will be sincere when they say, referring to Mozart and Coltrane alike, “Why would anyone listen to that?!”)—that is the fear. Can we expect the same for Amouage—or perhaps I should say “more of the same” given the hopefully-not-portentous fates of Fate Man, Myths Man, Bracken Man, Figment Man? (Please tell me at least the blueprints for these gems have been saved from the Alexandrian fire!) Kidz-Bop reformulations with the cheapest ingredients and lowest oil concentrations the lowest common denominator will permit (and surely they will permit a lot of bar-lowering when the competing options, think Burger King vs McDonald’s or Pepsi vs Coke, have pretty much the same safe formula and so is all the people know, their horizon of possibilities that of prisoners)—is that a future fast approaching as it seems to be almost everywhere else in the sanitized West (where for now at least, until even it goes the algorithm-flagged way of “nigger” and “faggot” and “retard,” we need to say “un-alive” instead of that cPTSD d-word)?
I do not know enough about Salmon’s releases to say how well he has continued Chong’s bold legacy of avant-garde compositions meant to embody narratives beyond just “panty dropping.” His business background, coupled with certain comments suggesting his desire to a move toward “what the people want” (almost saying flat-out “we will always have consumers, so to hell with these autistic frag nerds who want artisanal all the damn time”—that has raised my eyebrows: will even this little cove of artistry I have found in Amouage, a refuge from the bright colors and synthetic smiles of the Hallmark channel, soon smell like Taylor Swift (even the pussy douched to a funkless blah of unseasoned chicken breast)? His having pumped out many fragrances in such a short span (a rapid-release schedule typical of corporate ownership, rushing things to market without the depth and nuance that come from extensive development and conscientious gestation and painful labor)—that has given 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 love drama—myself included. What else are we to do to avoid the gaping chasm of our mortality? We really do hold drama dear, enough to manufacture it (from middle-school cafeterias of stolen-crush gossip to penitentiary yards of wrong-color beef, and everywhere else in between). We find purpose and escape in bitching—so much, in fact, that losing 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—I do enjoy Boundless (even as I admit it bears the vanillic mark of creative forces playing it safe, in fear of alienating audiences) and two of my more prized Amouage bottles are boundary-pushing releases under Salmon: (a) Opus XIV (Royal Tobacco), an award-winning scent that is up there with my full-bottle favorites from Chong’s era (Jubilation 25, Memoir Man, Journey Man, Epic Man; even perhaps Overture Man and Interlude 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 versatility 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 for an art-centered person such as myself. Even those who dislike such dark and smokey compositions will not deny the respectable talent 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 philistines, this release possesses too much style to enjoy universal appeal—and boat-rocking style at that: picture, although his scent would be Imitation Man if I am really being precise, Basquiat sauntering through some Idaho Kmart in the 1980s. This is saying too little, of course. It fails to differentiate Silver Oud from various other niche offerings (whether the honeyed Naxos by Xerjoff in 2015, on the one extreme of wearability, to the animalic Afrika Olifant by Nishane also in 2015, on the other). Undeniably olfactory art in a bottle and yet more balanced in comparison to schizoid compositions like Nishane’s Unutamam (2019), 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 funk of fecality, a function 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 as shit in the form of rank compost scattered around fruit trees. Although the manure sensation dissipates, it does set the earthy-animalic tone of the fragrance’s impressively long life (lasting weeks and weeks on clothing like Nasomatto’s Duro and Sospiro’s Erba Leather). For better or worse, that divisive aroma in the fragrance’s inflationary period—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 a cigarette lit on the notch of a full ashtray, mainly a function of the ambrarome and guaiac wood and birch and characteristic Amouage incense, does seem slightly mentholated)—the star ingredient wastes no time making its appearance: cypriol (nagarmotha), here used to bolster an oud impression of the high-grade Assam agarwood 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 a mix of fresh and cindered Virginia cedarwood chips. Add in as well a patchouli that lends a vintage masculine feel reminiscent of my cherished cheapie Lapidus Pour Homme (1987)—clearly patchouli of the highest quality, though, here in Silver Oud: not merely steam distilled but molecularly distilled (the difference, roughly, between carbon filtration and reverse-osmosis filtration). Add in as well what seems to my nose to be what links it again to my twin loves, Nishane’s Unutamam (2019) and Caron’s Yatagan (1978): pine tar (or maybe it is just a resinous 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.
I love my smokey scents and Silver Oud takes the cake in that regard. The charred cedarwood here rings with the excellence of Profumum Roma’s Arso (2010), only louder (at least until my Arso, fingers crossed, gets a bit more life into it after some oxidation). Silver Oud just never stops being smokey—charred, ashy, sulfurous (all of it). Yet it remains well balanced, allowing other accords space to sing. Unlike with many smoke-forward compositions, the smokiness does not dip into the barbecue-sauce or liquid-mesquite territories of two of my favorites: Akro’s Smoke (2018) and Beaufort London’s Vi et Armis (2015). The smoke in Silver Oud does have a subtle but chronic sulfurous aspect that can lend, if only for over-parsing noses, a gunpowder or firecracker feel. Indeed, I think that the sulfurous tinge to the smoke (which not only reinforces the burn compost impression of the oud, but also lends an acrid metallic quality) vindicates the “silver” in the title “Silver Oud,” which for a long time I felt would be more appropriately titled something like “Charred Oud.” But unlike with Beaufort London’s 1805 Tonnerre (2015), where a cannonball-blast accord is front and center, Silver Oud never veers in a smoked-trout direction—another risk that smoke-centric compositions face. Yes, Silver Oud’s ashy quality can at times tickle the throat. But it is much more restrained than what we see in Rasasi’s Tobacco Blaze (2013), a benchmark ash apocalypse. The ashy quality comes off here as refined and powdery. Reminiscent, in that way, to Serge Lutens’s Chergui (2001), the powder has a snuff feel of sweet tobacco dried and then pestled. Especially in its midlife the powder goes a bit dusty, almost like the mummy motes of a freshly opened Egyptian sarcophagus. But the more time I spend with this fragrance the more I think of a straight up powder room—dandy-like even. Placed in the larger context, which is dark and charred and earthy and sulfurous, that powder room would have to be that of someone like Satan—the sophisticated, witty, charming, gentlemanly version we get of him in Goethe’s Faust. Silver Oud, if we put these pieces together, manages to combine the darkness of Amouage’s Interlude Man (2012) with the elegance of Amouage’s Dia Man (2002)—a remarkable feat.
Do not let the allusion to Dia Man and its peony tinkle get you confused. 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, and perhaps due to the cord biting of a Griswald cat, 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 what 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 (2019), that Rome has long since fallen. Now most of the peaches, apples, black currants, 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.
Herein lies a major differentiator between Silver Oud and King Blue, a more approachable assam agarwood release in the opus line—and one, brighter and nonsmokey, that seems more like a Silver Oud flanker: Silver Oud Summer or Silver Oud Blossom, so one might name it. The fruit in King Blue (black current and tart mandarin specifically) seem alive, which helps the fragrance connote a springtime dawn of convalescence from the existential midnight of Silver Oud. Remember, Silver Oud is a symbol of that liminal space where organic materials (fruit, meat, bones) are, on the one hand, no longer animate (full of life the way they were when then apple was on the tree or in the fridge, or when the turkey was squabbling with a rival) and yet, on the other hand, not yet completely churned back into a relatively homogenous soil. And herein lies one way to distinguish Silver Oud from another woody oriental I find close at least in theme: Figment Man, my scent of the day. Although both are extremely woody and earthy, and although we might say both easily present images of damp soil full of grubs and fungus, Figment Man—a scent of petrichor photorealism (broken-root soil, say, in the Pacific Northwest during an overcast dig for earthworms before a morning fishing trip)—is at the other end of this transitional range. Instead of dirt active with rot we get dirt well past that point: the dirt on potatoes and carrots and mushrooms especially. We have full on soil with Figment Man, cedary-piney earth excreted several times over by worms such that no hint remains of, say, an apple-core decomposing. Figment Man, which unlike Silver Oud never gets smokey (another crucial difference), can at times even go as lifeless and inert as a musty trunk in an attic covered with defunct spiderwebs.
Now, what about that vanilla? Could that be the one exception to the otherwise ubiquitous darkness of Silver Oud? 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 (2014), 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 Young Goodman Brown beholds the frolicking of 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, a snuggly feel reminiscent of Profumum Roma’s Ambra Aurea (1998) (although more powdery here than chewy), 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 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 I step on the scene in 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,” too “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 of 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, the same manure agarwood presented so well by Rania J in Assam Oud (2013) and Areej Le Doré’s Russian Oud (2018). 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, although maybe Figment Man works better here. I think of this as the odor not of Arthur or Lancelot or Gawain but—and maybe Figment Man is more appropriate here too—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 adds imagistic emphasis to the point, growing all over him even as he lives.
The more I think about it, however, the more I move away from Bumi and Percival and even Radagast. The burnt compost impression so impressed me in my first experiences with Silver Oud that I missed the powdery elegance of the whole. I now think that Mephistopheles, Goethe’s aristocratic and cultured version of Satan, better represents the scent. Mephisto definitely checks a lot of the boxes: dark, earth-forward in the Nietzschean and LaVeyan sense (denial of the supernatural and of the non-animality of humans), burnt and sulfurous—all while being refined, sophisticated, almost to dandy degrees. The solid link I feel Silver Oud has to Unutamam (pine, castoreum, patchouli, burnt-caramel amber) only reinforces the Satan point, at least to how I have positioned Unutamam among other scents: Dia Man is the breath of the baby Christ; Jubilation 25 is the breath of the adult Christ; Yatagan is the breath of the baby antichrist; Unutamam is the breath of the adult antichrist.
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 I 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 unconventional 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—regardless of gender, 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 Parfums de Marly’s Herod or Xerjoff’s Naxos or Amouage’s own Boundless, which might just beat out the other two) 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 might prefer Zarokian’s Royal Tobacco (more of a Gandalf fragrance). (At this level of competition it really does depend on the day, the mood, the needs.) 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 convivial whereas Silver Oud is drier, more daringly animalic and sensual, 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 (up there with Figment Man): 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.
To end on the tired note of season and compliment factor, Silver Oud is not for incels who judge a perfume’s merit by how much compliments it garners. Those people hang art on walls as decoration. Fuck them. And fuck compliments. I like art. The panty-dropper bullshit has got to stop anyway. It is arguable an ethical duty when sex-sex-sex superficiality continues to swallow the entire West. People will say this is for winter only. That is “understandable” when it comes to westerners, whose only experience of oud is through Tom Ford. But just like my Interlude Man, I will wear this whenever I want. Indeed (and as surely those who enjoy this fragrance despite living in solely high heat environments), Silver Oud really blooms in high heat. Imagine what it might do in Dubai—yes, even under an abaya?
Treble: Patchouli, Cypriol, Virginia Cedar
Mid: Assam Agarwood, Madagascar vanilla
Bass: Castoreum, Birch, Ambrarome, Guaiac wood
