Precious woods: where sandalwood, oud and cedarwood really come from

The precious woods of perfumery come from trees that are slow to give up their scent. Indian sandalwood is distilled from the heartwood and roots of a tree that lives partly off other plants' roots; oud comes from a resin that some Asian trees only make after being wounded and infected; and most of the "cedar" in perfume is actually juniper or cypress. Each has its own page in the club: the sandalwood note, the oud note and the cedarwood note.

Two of these materials now sit under international rules. Every agarwood-producing species in the genera Aquilaria and Gyrinops has been listed in Appendix II of CITES since 2004, and Indian sandalwood is classed as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). For the perfume on your shelf, that means plantations, substitutes and label words worth reading carefully.

Where does Indian sandalwood come from, and why is it scarce?

Indian sandalwood (Santalum album), also called East Indian sandalwood, grows naturally in India, Sri Lanka and Indonesia. In its 1995 book on flavours and fragrances of plant origin, the FAO describes an oil distilled from the heartwood and roots with a characteristic sweet, woody odour, prized as a fixative because about 90 percent of it is santalols, compounds that evaporate slowly. In India it is the base of traditional attars, where flowers are distilled straight into sandalwood oil.

Santalum album is a root parasite that needs host plants to grow, which makes it hard to cultivate. The same source notes that trees planted outside their natural range give wood of very variable oil content, sometimes with little or no aroma.

India holds most of the resource. According to the Sandalwood Information System of the Institute of Wood Science and Technology in Bangalore, more than 90 percent of the country's sandalwood grows in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, and timber exports are banned except for handicraft pieces of up to 50 grams. Two researchers from the same institute note, in a 2024 Indian Forester paper on sandalwood grading, that a drastic fall in the number of large trees in wild populations led the IUCN to categorise the species as vulnerable.

How is Australian sandalwood managed?

Western Australian sandalwood (Santalum spicatum) is a different species: a slow-growing, long-lived small tree that is also hemiparasitic. Western Australia's Forest Products Commission harvests up to 2,500 tonnes of wild sandalwood a year, roughly half from live trees and half from dead wood.

Natural regeneration has been poor for more than 50 years, partly because small marsupials such as the woylie, which used to bury the seeds, have largely disappeared. The commission now plants more than five million seeds a year along mechanical rip-lines designed to mimic the woylie, and manages about 6,000 hectares of plantations that will grow until at least age 25 so that oil can develop in the heartwood.

How does a wounded tree make oud?

Oud, or agarwood, is resin-soaked wood produced mainly by trees of the genera Aquilaria and Gyrinops in several Asian countries. The report of the 2022 validation workshop on agarwood held under the CITES Tree Species Programme, published by the International Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO), puts it in one line:

The resin is a defence. A 2022 review of agarwood's fragrant molecules in the journal Molecules explains that it helps the tree hold back the microbes invading it, and estimates that only 10 percent of wild Aquilaria trees are infected and produce resin; natural agarwood takes twenty years or more to form. Its scent comes mainly from sesquiterpenes and from rarer molecules, 2-(2-phenylethyl)chromones, linked to the warm, balsamic, lingering sweetness of burning agarwood.

Oud oil is made by steam distillation, mostly from lower-grade chips and powder, according to the 2022 report; the class on how fragrance materials are extracted covers the method. The same report records prices of up to 100,000 US dollars per kilo for top-quality agarwood, and links them to unsustainable levels of extraction.

What does CITES actually control for agarwood?

CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, listed Aquilaria malaccensis in Appendix II in the mid-1990s and added every other agarwood-producing species of Aquilaria and Gyrinops at its 2004 conference, according to a TRAFFIC article on CITES and sustainable forest management, published by the FAO.

Appendix II is not a ban. The TRAFFIC article explains that it covers species not considered as threatened as those in Appendix I but which may become so if trade is not regulated. Trade is allowed under permit, and each export requires the exporting country's scientific authority to find that it will not harm the species' survival.

The listing reaches well beyond raw logs. As presented by the CITES Secretariat in the 2022 report, it covers all parts and derivatives except seeds and pollen, seedlings grown in vitro, fruits, leaves, exhausted agarwood powder, and finished products packaged and ready for retail trade, an exemption that does not apply to wood chips, beads, prayer beads and carvings. In practice, agarwood chips or prayer beads brought home from a trip are not in the same position as a boxed bottle; check the exact rules with customs, as they may have changed since 2022.

Does the "cedar" in a perfume come from a cedar tree?

Usually not. The FAO's 1995 book explains that the most important cedarwood oils are distilled from junipers and cypresses (Juniperus and Cupressus) rather than true cedars (Cedrus). Virginia cedarwood comes from Juniperus virginiana, the eastern red cedar; Texas cedarwood from another juniper; Chinese cedarwood from a cypress, Cupressus funebris. China and the United States were then the main producers.

True cedars are used too: Himalayan cedar (Cedrus deodara), distilled in India since the late 1950s, and Atlas cedar (Cedrus atlantica), whose oil Morocco produces in small volumes. The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh's page on Atlas cedar among the world's threatened conifers lists it as Endangered on the IUCN Red List. Logging, fire and heavy grazing by goats are the main threats, its area of occupancy is estimated to have shrunk by up to 75 percent between 1940 and 1982, and droughts since the 1980s have added to the decline. Both its timber and its foliage are distilled.

Sandalwood, oud and cedar compared

The woody family, as Mademoiselle Bulle describes it for readers choosing a scent, brings cedar, sandalwood and oud together with vetiver and patchouli, and the club files them in the woody fragrance family too. Behind that shared word, the trees, materials and rules differ a great deal.

What replaces rare woods in a perfume?

Sandalwood was replaced early. The FAO reported in 1995 that demand for sandalwood oil fell sharply in the 1970s because of very high prices and synthetic substitutes, while the natural oil kept its place in top-grade products. The class on natural versus synthetic ingredients tells the wider story of how chemistry expanded the perfumer's palette.

Cedarwood plays a double role. Its oils scent soaps, household sprays and floor polishes, and their main compounds, such as cedrol and cedrene, are a raw material for the chemical industry, which turns them into new fragrance ingredients, again according to the FAO.

For oud, the answer starts with cultivation. The 2022 report describes plantations where most producing countries now drill the trees and apply a fungal inoculant, and the Molecules review cites trials in which this artificial induction produced agarwood ten times faster than natural formation. In the same report, ITTO's executive director stressed that it is extremely difficult to reproduce the quality of naturally formed material in plantations.

So a perfume labelled oud or sandalwood may contain natural wood, plantation wood, synthetic molecules that suggest it, or a mix: a note name describes a smell, not a guaranteed material. Only the house that made the perfume can say what is inside, and the class on allergens and IFRA standards explains what the single word "parfum" covers in an ingredient list.

Exercise: three woods, no bottle

This takes about fifteen minutes, uses what you have at home, and involves nothing on your skin.

1. Gather three dry, untreated woods: a pencil you can sharpen, a wooden spoon or spatula, and a wooden skewer or a slat from a fruit crate. If you have a sandalwood or oud incense stick, add it, unlit.
2. Smell each wood as it is, a few centimetres from your nose. Then scratch it with a fingernail or a small file, smell again and note what changes: strength, dryness, a sweet, dusty or resinous edge.
3. Dampen one corner of each piece with a drop of water, wait a minute and smell a third time.
4. For the unlit incense stick, compare it with your memory of the smoke, and note whether the two tell the same story.
5. Share your notes in the Woods, Mosses & Roots circle, where members compare the woods in their everyday lives.

A wood's scent sits inside the material and comes out when you open it up: distilling sandalwood or cedar goes after the same thing, on a very different scale.