Okoumé
Note Profile
About
The Gabon resin reading of okoume: dry balsamic wood, smoked and powdery, not the timber.
Scent Profile
Okoumé smells like a dry balsamic wood resin rather than the raw timber, a bark gum-resin burned as incense. Amber resinous and dry woody sit together at the top, neither taking over. Smoky comes from the incense burn itself. Powdery shows through from an iris note, alongside a soft, sandalwood-like creamy body.
ScentWheel
Read off the wheel, not a label applied to the note.
ScentArt
Origin
Okoume is Aucoumea klaineana, a Gabonese tree in the Burseraceae family and the main plywood timber of central Africa. The wood itself is close to odourless. The Wood Database records "No characteristic odor" for it, and the single hobbyist comment on the same page calling the smell strong and sweet is uncorroborated anywhere else, so I treat it as an outlier. What does smell is the bark gum-resin, which Protabase describes as smelling of turpentine and being used for torches, lamps and incense. There is no okoume oil, absolute or isolate with a published odour profile.
Usage in Perfumery
Perfumery use of the name follows the resin and incense reading, not the timber. Pierre Guillaume builds Noir Okoume to evoke the Kandea resin of Gabon from an accord of Loban (olibanum), oolong leaves, myrrh, sandalwood and iris, and describes the result as woody balsamic, both smoked and powdery.
Similar Notes
Perfumes featuring Okoumé
A selection of reviewed perfumes where Okoumé appears prominently.
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