Why Oud Costs Four Times the Rose — Epoche A2
Oasis Perfumes - Perfume Souk, Deira, Dubai Come in out of the heat. The shop is one long, cool, dark room, and it is arranged from light to heavy. By the door: the fresh things. Lemon, green herbs, light musks for the office. In the middle, on the left wall: the roses - Taif rose from the mountain farms of Saudi Arabia, 3 ml for 55 dirhams. Everything is sold as pure oil, measured from the big glass jars into your bottle, in front of your eyes. And at the back, in the locked glass cabinet: oud. 3 ml for 180. Why four times the price? Because oud cannot be farmed like a rose. It comes from the agar tree, which grows in the forests of Southeast Asia. A healthy tree has pale, light wood with almost no smell - and almost no value. But when the tree is wounded and a mould grows in the wound, the tree fights back. Over many years it fills that wood with a dark, heavy, sweet-smelling resin. Only this dark wood gives oud. In the wild, a cutter can open many trees and find nothing. Take a paper strip, walk the street, and smell it again before you choose. Open every day, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.; Friday from 2 p.m. Shop 14, Sikkat Al Khail Road.