The wound
Aquilaria yields nothing while it is sound. Fungus wounds it, the tree answers with resin, and oud is that defence after it hardens.
Our story
THEGRAY
An oud house in Dubai. We choose the wood one piece at a time, and distil it in small batches.
No bulk runs, no cutting, no name bought off a shelf.
Small batches
THEGRAY
Oils drawn by the hand, not by the factory
- Artisanal Oils
- Oil from cultivated wood, distilled in small batches — no bulk runs, no cutting.
- Rare Oud
- Selected pieces of royal Indian and the scarcer origins, offered one at a time.
- Musk and Blends
- Alongside the wood: musk and blends composed in-house, the old way.
Three origins
Varieties of Oud, and Its Uses
Every soil has its scent — to perfume a room, to settle the mind, to honour a guest
- Indian
- From Assam and Meghalaya. Deeply smoky — the heaviest in presence, and the longest to hold on cloth.
- Cambodian
- Sweet and warm, leaning to a soft oriental character. It burns easily, and the Gulf loves it above the rest.
- Vietnamese
- Soft and quiet, never insistent. Sought for stillness and a clear room rather than for presence.
One to three percent
Oud Oil
A drop drawn from tens of kilograms
- Soaking
- Chips are soaked in water for one to three days, until the wood softens and the resin is freed.
- Distillation
- Distilled by steam or by water. For the finest grades a single cycle can run ten to fifteen days unbroken.
- Yield
- Soaked wood surrenders only one to three percent of its weight as oil. The price comes from that, not from advertising.
Why oud
The costliest wood on earth is not measured by scarcity alone.
Scarcity
The infection never takes a whole forest. It passes one tree and leaves its neighbour, so resinous wood stays scarce however wide the forest runs.
Tenacity
Oud oil sits among the heaviest molecules in perfumery, so it does not lift off with the first hours. It stays on the cloth after the cloth is folded.
The majlis
In the Gulf the burner is passed to the guest before farewell. The smoke is not only a scent — it is a signal agreed upon for centuries.
Collections
Four doors into the collection.
Selections
Pieces offered one at a time.
