Okoumé

Note Profile

Botanical

About

The Gabon resin reading of okoume: dry balsamic wood, smoked and powdery, not the timber.

Scent Profile

Amber_resinous and dry_woody sit together at the top and neither dominates, because the two independent sources point at the same place from different directions: a bark gum-resin used as incense, and a perfume house calling its okoume accord woody balsamic. Smoky is the incense burn, named by the maker and repeated in its own product tags. Powdery is the iris in that accord and the brand tag Powder, which makes it the least material-grounded of the four and the reason its spread is the widest here. Creamy_woody is the sandalwood in the same accord. The turpentine character the botanical source reports has no home in these 32 facets. It sits between dry_woody and a coniferous quality this vocabulary does not carry, so it is spread across aromatic_herbal, green and citrus rather than forced into one.

ScentWheel

Breadthbroad

EnvelopeBase · ~24h lasting

Family Amber · Musk · Leather, Woody & Earthy

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

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. That is a constructed accord standing in for the tree, so this vector describes what perfumers put under the name rather than a scent read off a wood sample.