Oud is having a moment in America, and I have complicated feelings about it. Not because I want to gatekeep — I run a perfume house, I would be an idiot to complain about demand. It is because I have watched what usually happens when the West discovers something that was never made for it.
What is actually happening
One of the defining fragrance trends of 2026 is the surge of oud in the US market. Gen Z and Millennials are driving it, and the stated reason is authenticity and cultural depth — they want something with a history attached. Meanwhile the UAE has become a genuine hub of fragrance innovation, with a wave of new Emirati niche houses launching this year. So the traffic is moving both ways at once. Our scents are going out. Global capital and attention are coming in. That is a good problem, and it is still a problem.
The thing that gets lost in translation
In the Gulf, oud was never a product. It was a gesture. It is what you burn before a guest arrives. It is what lingers in a majlis long after everyone has gone home. It is not a top note in a marketing deck — it is a hospitality ritual that happens to smell extraordinary. When a fragrance gets exported, the ritual rarely makes the trip. What travels is the molecule. What stays behind is the meaning. Building Hdaiacom Perfume taught me that you cannot ship a memory. You can only make something honest enough that a person builds their own memory around it.
On the new oud experiments
2026’s trend reports are full of oud paired with unexpected notes — sea salt, light florals, things designed to make oud feel “approachable.” My honest position: some of it is excellent, and some of it is cowardice dressed as innovation. Excellent is when the pairing reveals something in the oud you had not noticed — salt pulling out the mineral edge of a good Cambodian. Cowardice is when the florals are there to apologise for the oud, to sand it down until it stops making anyone uncomfortable. Oud is supposed to be a lot. That is the entire point. A scent that takes twenty years to form inside a wounded tree should not be polite.
The part that genuinely matters
Sustainability and ingredient transparency are now top-tier consumer concerns, and for oud this is not a marketing checkbox — it is survival. Wild agarwood is finite. Sustainably sourced oud, plant-based alcohol, refillable bottles: these are not trends, they are the price of the category still existing in thirty years. AI is being used now to analyse preferences and design bespoke scents. Fine. Use it to find the person. Do not use it to find the formula. An algorithm optimising for what the most people will tolerate produces exactly what you would expect — something nobody hates and nobody remembers. Wear oud because it says something about where you stand, not because an app told you it matched your profile.
A scent that apologises for itself was never worth wearing.