Purple Kyara - Sultani

pure oud oil (attar)

In the world of oud oil the pinnacle has long been set at "Kinamic like" profiles, the famed Taiwanese distillations and their imitations by outsiders, capture just a facet of the Kinam profile, knowing the wood material used and the resulting aroma - kinam like is indeed the best these oils could achieve - a lofty tag in itself.

So where is SQ oud in all of this? In a different time, say the 80s and 90s, a kilogram of pristine sinking wood was perhaps a few hundred dollars per kilogram, the sort of wood teeming with black resin, the very grail wood that all collectors aspire to own. 

Today what does a few hundred dollars get you? light coloured wood, perhaps from less prestigious regions, those distilling with high grade materials are paying thousands of dollars per kg for material today, using just small batches at a time - even with a blank cheque, the material is just too scarce.

We regularly work with collectors today with blank cheques, paying hundreds of thousands per kg for oud wood for their collections, the kind of woods all too common in the 80s, such wood is almost too precious for them to burn let alone pack into the pots for oils - even for them such dreams are unattainable.

Everyone thinks they've experienced SQ oud, often describing it as lacklustre or not worth the money, yet so few people have even experienced legitimate "standard" SQ oud, so much of what is out there is dupes, refilled authentic gold bottles and a lack of knowledge on both sides of the transaction.

Even among the real SQ oud artefacts, the only thing that makes them present in the outside world is the willingness to sell and trade by the collectors holding these gifts, whatever their reasons. But ask yourself, when is the last time you seen SQ wood? 

For all the oils out there, surely there's 10x the amount of wood? This is the gulf after all, a region which prizes oud wood above oil in nearly all cases, yet we see so little oud wood hailing from SQ archives. Perhaps a little flurry around 2020-2022 and nothing after. 

The answer is very simple, the collectors owning SQ oud woods know exactly the value and scarcity of what they have, for people for whom money is no object, there's virtually no reason to let go of irreplaceable woods from another echelon - as you'll learn, this applies to oils equally.

There's a tier to SQ oud oil that only few have access to, a tier which contains the genuinely true & rare micro batches of SQ oud oils, the sorts of oils which even the original collectors to whom it was gifted to only have a limited quantity of.

Quantity which pales in comparison to their large 20 tola bottles of "regular" SQ oud oils. You can only understand their reluctance to let go, and empathise with those that do.

Oils like this only come forth every now and again, with waits of months or even years just for a few grams at a time, they defy all expectations, living up to the hype and shattering any doubts. 

Recently I met some prominent collectors, collectors who have tried all the oud world has, with just about every oil and wood imaginable in their collections, the look on their faces after experiencing Purple Kyara was something else, perplexed and in awe of what they had just smelt - an oil that is truly from a different echelon to anything else they've experienced.