Oud has been trending, as they say, for well over a year now, but it isn't exactly something that gets my imagination roaming, and for the most part I've ignored all the latest iterations. I've smelled them, but they haven't been bottle worthy to me. This is probably the only time I'll write about them, yet I don't intend to make anything like a definitive statement. I'm not going to get into the history of Oud--the what, why, and where. I think other people have said it better than I can, and generally the narrative of oud seems very manufactured to me at this point anyway, something which has steeped in corporate speak for so long that it resembles fantasy and fiction more than reality. I'm not interested enough to parse the layers. I just want to put my very narrow-minded two cents in.
I bought Bond no.9's Signature Scent last year and liked it very much, but it seemed only peripherally about oud to me. It's a strange, brassy thing, and while I can't get enough of it I can see where its detractors would be coming from. The truth is, I haven't heard much about Signature either way--good, bad, or indifferent. Bond has done some damage to its image the past several years, partly due to its attack dog tactics, partly due to its overabundance. People don't seem to want to say much about Bond at all these days, and I totally understand that. A 300 dollar fragrance isn't going to change that.
But Bond no.9's New York Oud certainly changed my mind about oud. I realize now that maybe it isn't that I dislike oud or am even indifferent to it, necessarily. Maybe I simply don't like the overwhelming majority of oud fragrances because of the fragrances themselves, rather than because of a distaste for their theme. On the surface, New York Oud smells like every other oud, just as one fig fragrance smells like fig, thus like all figs. On the surface, New York Oud is true to form for an oud fragrance--so why do I like it so much and the others so little (i.e. not enough)? Don't expect me to get to the bottom of anything, but I'll start with the oud decants I've tested over the past year, in the order they arrived.
