Oud Wood
Oud wood is a raw-material family: the resinous heartwood of Aquilaria and Gyrinops, sold in physical forms — chips, chips-and-dust, blocks, shavings and offcuts — for distilling, for burning or as an object. It is not a particular lot, it carries no fragrance formulation, and none of its fields is governed by a published standard. What a buyer settles is the species, the physical form, the treatment and the batch.
What this family includes
The family covers agarwood sold as material rather than as a prepared product: chips of a stated size, the mixed chips-and-dust fraction that comes off a cutting line, blocks and half-blocks, and the shavings and offcuts a processor keeps. The form usually follows the use, because distillation wants a consistent chip size and a workshop wants pieces large enough to hold.
Because a family is a category rather than a product, the useful question is where the material sits in the supply chain. Wood sold by a grower or a collector is a different transaction from wood sold by a processor who has cut and graded it, and the record that travels with it is different too.
Not the same as
Oud wood is not oud oil. The oil is what comes out of the wood when it is distilled; the wood is what goes in. A buyer who needs a quantity of oil should buy oil, because distilling recovers a fraction of the wood weight and the still, the fuel and the time are all the buyer's.
It is not bakhoor, which is wood that has already been infused with oil and is sold ready to burn. It is not an oud accord, which is a manufactured fragrance material. And it is not a sinking grade or a Super label, both of which are trade vocabulary with no published standard behind them.
Material and format fields
The fields a buyer should fill in are the species, the physical form and cut size, whether the material is wild or cultivated, whether it has been treated and with what, the batch reference, and the weight basis of the quotation. Species is the one field with regulatory consequences: all members of Aquilaria and Gyrinops are listed in CITES Appendix II, and the species decides the documentation a shipment has to carry.
None of the other fields has a published standard behind it. There is no published definition of a chip size, of a dust fraction, of a treated wood, or of a grade. What can be asked for instead is a description: what was cut, from what, and how it was handled.
Comparisons
Wood stands against oil, against bakhoor and against the wood of another tree. Within the family, chips serve distillation, blocks and larger pieces serve burning or objects, and the dust fraction serves neither well. Chips with visible resin are not interchangeable with clean whitewood, and a seller who treats them as one product is not describing the same material twice.
Buyer requirements
Settle the use before the price, because a distillation buyer and a burning buyer want different cuts. Then ask for the species, the treatment, the batch reference and the weight basis, and ask whether the quoted price belongs to a specific lot or to a market level. A price per kilo with no resin figure attached is a market level, and a market level moves between quotations.
Related suppliers
The supplier directory separates the trades a wood buyer deals with: growers and collectors at the origin end, wood processors and exporters who cut and grade, and wholesalers who sell in trade quantities. A wood supplier worth approaching is one whose paperwork names the species and the harvest documentation, because a shipment cannot be documented from a photograph of resinous colour.
Relevant guides
Choosing an oud wood purchase sets out the questions to press on before a quotation arrives. Wood versus oil: choose a format explains when wood is the wrong purchase altogether. Conservation and trade documentation covers the papers a species-listed shipment has to carry.
- Search the supplier directory
- Start a request for quote
- Read choosing an oud wood purchase
This page defines the family and the fields a buyer should fill in. It does not assess any lot, does not state a resin content or a yield, and does not establish the legal status of any specific shipment.
- Biodiversity and application prospects of fungal endophytes in the agarwood-producing genera Aquilaria and Gyrinops (Thymelaeaceae): a reviewStates that all members of the agarwood-producing genera Aquilaria and Gyrinops are placed in CITES Appendix II. Records 92 compounds identified in agarwood, of which terpenoids are 40.22%, and names eighteen fungal genera reported to promote agarwood formation. It does not establish the quality, yield or age of any material, and it is a review rather than a regulatory instrument.
- Agarwood: A reviewStates that CITES Appendix II covers all species of Aquilaria and Gyrinops, and reports fifteen Aquilaria species distributed across the tropical and subtropical regions of Asia, from Pakistan and India through southern China into Southeast Asia. It does not establish the legal status of any individual shipment in any particular jurisdiction.
OudGuide editorial review · 2026-10-21
Reviewed against the cited sources. The family boundary was checked against the format descriptions elsewhere in the encyclopedia, the absence of a published standard for each field was checked rather than asserted, and no composition, concentration, price or grade is stated anywhere on the page.