I acquired a sample of Dahn Al Oudh Al Shams probably about a year ago, put it in one of my boxes or bags somewhere and promptly forgot all about it. Perhaps I had grown sick of oud by then (in truth, quite a long time before that). As I mentioned the other day, I have catalogued all my samples now and when I came across the Dahn Oudh, I opened the vial briefly to have a sniff. The most pungent smell of what one can only describe as close to raw silage met my nose, or in slightly pretty terms, barnyard. The interesting thing is that while I am quite familiar with oud perfumes, real or not, I've never really encountered such a raw, skanky oud note. Many ouds I've tried have smelled medicinal, woody, musty, almost musky at times, but not really very barnyard.
The pong is long lasting too if you get it on your clothes. I decided to wear the Dahn Oud the next day. On skin, that barnyard skank was as pronounced as it was out the vial. For the first hour, I felt rather self conscious, thinking that someone would either think that I live on a farm, or worse, happened to have had a bowel incident. Fortunately the oudh note does soften in time, to become woodier and more resinous. I've read that Dahn is a term for Indian Oud. Now I'm not going to go into Indian Oud versus Cambodian, etc etc and bore you to tears (there's plenty of that on Basenotes if you're interested in the anoraks' discourse), but apparently Indian Ouds do smell quite feral, so no surprise there.
The most interesting part of my day wearing Dahn Oudh was when I got home that evening and asked my daughter Hannah to sniff my wrist. Bearing in mind this was almost twelve hours later, she recoiled in horror and said: "Daddy, yuck. That smells like a toffee you've taken out of the bin"! Bless her...
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