Gaharu Buaya

Note Profile

Botanical

About

Gaharu buaya is the fragrant wood of Aetoxylon sympetalum, a Borneo tree sold across the agarwood trade as a cheap stand-in for true oud. The trade also calls it crocodile agarwood or white oud. It is not an Aquilaria or a Gyrinops, so it is not agarwood, and two trade sellers say so in plain words.

Scent Profile

Dry_woody is the one thing all four sources agree on. Gaharu Jinkou calls it 'light smell thats very sweet and woodsy'. Grandawood calls it 'muddy, woody mainly'. Nefertitis lists 'woody'. OudDict reports 'fermented woods'. Sweet_vanillic rests on two sources: 'very sweet' and 'much, much sweeter' than Aquilaria from the trade blog, plus 'sweetly resinous' from the retailer. Amber_resinous comes from that same 'sweetly resinous' phrase and is the resin half of it. Fruity has one source only, the Nefertitis listing, which opens 'fruity - floral - intoxicating'. Earthy is Grandawood's 'muddy'. Leather and animalic come from the OudDict forum, where burners report 'dark shoe polish scent, maybe leathery', 'goat hair, barn, creamy leather' and 'the crocodile has quite a bite'. Floral and creamy_woody are single-source traces. The spread is wide throughout because the sources split into two camps past the shared woody core, sweet and fruity in the sales copy, animalic and leathery in the burner reports, and the trade's own account of a variable second-grade material explains why.

ScentWheel

Breadthbroad

EnvelopeBase · ~12h lasting

Family Woody & Earthy, Sweet & Gourmand, Amber · Musk · Leather

Read off the wheel, not a label applied to the note.

Origin

Kalimantan and the rest of Borneo. The wood is burned as incense, turned into beads, and distilled into a low-cost oil sold as second-grade oudh.

Usage in Perfumery

Used as a budget oud substitute in incense and in oil blends. It carries almost no attestation in fine fragrance: one listing on Fragrantica and none on Parfumo.