Agarwood Uses: From Oud Oil and Bakhoor to Kōdō, Beads and Carvings

The main agarwood uses fall into five groups: aromatic oil, burned fragrance, ceremony, objects you wear or display, and traditional medicine. All five start from one raw material — resin-darkened wood from Aquilaria trees.^[1]

The numbers explain the price. According to Liu et al. (2013), only about 10% of Aquilaria trees produce agarwood without human help, so most supply today comes from induced, cultivated trees.^[6]

Healthy Aquilaria wood is pale and almost scentless. Only the parts of a trunk that have formed resin have trade value, and resin density changes from one piece to the next. Therefore the real question is never just what agarwood is used for. It is which piece goes to which use.

In practice, agarwood uses and grades are decided together. A dense, solid piece earns far more as a bead or a collector chip than as distillation feedstock. By contrast, a thin, lightly resinated offcut is worth more in a still or a powder mill than on a display shelf.

One Harvest, Many Uses

At our plantation in Guan Zhu Town, Dian Bai, we process more than 20 tons of agarwood material a month. Very little of a harvested trunk goes to a single destination; instead, it is split across many agarwood uses.

A typical trunk gives some carving blocks, some bead blanks, chips across several grades, oil feedstock and fine dust. Sorting all of that is the operator's real job. Founder Wang Jianyu grades each lot by visual inspection, aroma, resin content and sink test, and the grade then decides the use.

If you need the background on the material itself, our plain-language explanation of oud covers how resin forms and why the trade uses so many names for it.

Historically, every one of these uses ran on wild trees across South and Southeast Asia. Heavy collecting thinned those populations, which is one reason Aquilaria trade is now regulated.^[1] Our own supply for every use below is plantation Aquilaria sinensis, from our 100+ mu plantation and our 100+ contracted plantation farmers.

A Short History of Agarwood Use and Trade

Agarwood has been traded for more than two thousand years, carried from the forests of South and Southeast Asia to China, Japan, India and the Arabian Peninsula. Each region built its own uses: bakhoor and oud oil in the Gulf, incense and beads in China, kōdō in Japan, attar in India.

TRAFFIC's review of the trade traced those same routes and showed how demand for wood and oil put pressure on wild trees, which led to CITES controls.^[2] Our agarwood history guide tells the full story.

The table of agarwood uses hides one point that surprises new buyers. Price per gram does not follow grade in a straight line across forms, because each form carries its own processing cost.

For example, a buyer of graded oud wood chips by the kilo pays mainly for the wood and the sorting. An oil buyer pays for many kilos of wood, days of still time and the small amount of oil that comes out. A bead buyer pays for the rare solid block and the waste created by turning it.

In perfumery, agarwood is used as an oil. It is worn neat or nearly neat in the Gulf and South Asian tradition, and it is blended as a deep base note in Western-style perfume.

Among all agarwood uses, oil absorbs the most lightly resinated wood. Distillation pulls aromatics out of material that would look unimpressive on a chip tray.

The process is slow and the yield is small. Workers grind the wood, soak it, and then run long distillation cycles. How much oil a batch gives depends on resin content, particle size and the length of the run, so we do not quote a fixed yield.

Hydro-Distilled Oil vs CO₂ Oil

We run two extraction routes in-house. Our traditional hydro-distilled oud oil comes from soaked wood carried through water and steam. It usually gives the deep, warm and sometimes animalic profile that attar buyers expect.

Supercritical CO₂ extraction, by contrast, works at a much lower temperature. The result tends to sit closer to the smell of the raw wood, which suits natural perfumery and cosmetics formulators in Europe and North America. It is also cheaper per gram at our list prices: CO₂ oil starts from $1.50/g, hydro-distilled oil from $7.00/g, both with a 10 g MOQ.

Neither route is better for every product. Our guide to how oud oil is distilled and extracted walks through the trade-offs in detail. For lab support, we provide GC-MS reports on request.

Attar, Perfume Oils and Western Blends

Attar is an oil-based, alcohol-free perfume with deep roots in India and the Middle East. Some attars use oud oil on its own; many blend it with sandalwood or floral oils. Our attar buying guide for wholesale buyers explains how to specify one.

Western perfumery uses oud differently. Here it is usually one note among many, and a large share of fragrances labelled oud rely on a synthetic accord rather than real agarwood oil. That is a cost decision, not a scandal.

However, it matters for labelling. If your product claims natural agarwood content, buy documented oil and keep the paperwork, because the claim must match what is in the bottle.

Burning is the oldest of all agarwood uses and still the one with the widest range of products. Heat releases the aromatics as smoke or warm vapour, so the wood itself is the product.

Each burning culture, however, wants something different from the wood. Gulf buyers want rich smoke that fills a room. Japanese buyers want a quiet, precise scent from a tiny sliver. Chinese and Korean buyers want a steady, affordable stick for daily use.

Oud Chips and Bakhoor in the Gulf

In Saudi Arabia, the UAE and the wider Gulf, people burn agarwood chips in a mabkhara over charcoal or an electric heater. The smoke perfumes rooms, clothes and hair, and offering it to guests is a long-standing part of hospitality.

Plain oud chips are graded wood with nothing added, so their scent comes entirely from the resin. They are the most grade-sensitive product in Gulf retail.

Bakhoor is a different product. It usually means wood chips soaked or blended with fragrant oils and other aromatics, then dried. Because the added aromatics carry part of the scent, the wood base can be a lower grade. Our bakhoor chips for Gulf retail start from $6/g with a 250 g MOQ.

Incense Sticks, Cones and Altar Offerings

Across Greater China, South Korea and much of Southeast Asia, agarwood is pressed into sticks, coils and cones. Households burn them daily, and many are offered at Buddhist altars, where the Chinese term is 供香.

Sticks are made from powder, so they draw on lower grades and offcuts rather than whole pieces. Our sticks range from $2.35 to $5.89 per box with a 1 kg MOQ, in cored and coreless styles. For specifications, binders and burn time, see our agarwood incense stick sourcing guide.

Kōdō: Listening to Incense in Japan

Kōdō, the way of incense, is the Japanese art of appreciating aromatic wood. It is counted among the classical Japanese arts of refinement, alongside the tea ceremony and flower arrangement.^[3]

Participants do not burn the wood. Instead, a small sliver rests on a thin mica plate above charcoal buried in ash, and the gentle heat releases the scent. Practitioners describe this as "listening" to the incense.

That makes kōdō the most demanding of the burning agarwood uses. It needs small, consistent, precisely graded pieces, and every sliver is judged at close range. Japanese buyers also take pressed incense, and our Japanese-style koh incense starts from $6/g with a 100 g MOQ.

Some agarwood uses start with the eye rather than the nose. Solid, dense wood also has value as an object. It is turned into beads for bracelets and Buddhist prayer beads, and carved into figures, pendants and display pieces.

This market sits mainly in Greater China, where sinking-grade (沉水) pieces carry particular prestige. Worn beads give off a faint scent as they warm against the skin, so buyers judge them by nose as well as by eye.

These uses need large, crack-free pieces with resin running all the way through. Pale wood shows clearly on a polished bead, and a hidden void can split a carving. As a result, beads and carvings compete with top-grade chips for the best material on our grading table.

Pricing reflects that. Our bracelets are priced by weight from $18/g, carvings start from $98/piece with an MOQ of 5, and resinated logs start from $88/piece. Kynam (奇楠), the top tier, is allocation only and quoted per enquiry. Our bracelet wholesale guide covers bead sizes, styles and how to check them.

Finally, remember that a finished bead is still Aquilaria wood. Beads and carvings fall under the same CITES Appendix II listing as chips, so plan the paperwork before you plan the display case.

Agarwood has a long record in traditional Chinese, Ayurvedic and Unani practice, as well as in several Southeast Asian folk traditions. Scientific reviews document this history alongside the chemistry of the wood.^[4]

In traditional Chinese practice the material is called chén xiāng (沉香), the same name the incense trade uses.

We describe these traditional agarwood uses for context only. We make no health claims for any product we sell, and nothing on this page is medical advice. Laboratory papers on agarwood compounds are research findings, not evidence about any retail product.

For buyers, there is also a regulatory side. Selling agarwood for ingestion, or with any therapeutic claim, usually brings a product under medicine or food rules in the importing country. Those rules are separate from fragrance and CITES rules, so check with your own regulator before positioning a product that way.

The rule of thumb is simple. Match the grade to the agarwood use, and do not pay for resin your customer will never notice.

For example, AAA wood ground into incense powder throws away most of its value, because a stick cannot show what a whole piece can. Equally, D-grade chips sold to a kōdō buyer will disappoint, because the use magnifies every flaw.

Our step-by-step agarwood grading guide explains our tests and how to compare our scale with others. Every wholesale shipment from us carries a grading note or certificate.

Agarwood Tree Uses Beyond the Resin

Not every use of agarwood starts with resin. In parts of Asia, dried Aquilaria leaves are sold as agarwood tea, and pale trunk wood goes to fuel or filler. These are local markets, and we make no claims about them.

On our plantation, the resin is what pays for the tree. One trunk is routed to carving blocks, bead blanks, chips, distillation feed and powder. Our agarwood powder for incense makers starts from $10.30 per 50 g and comes from the smaller pieces.

Powder is one of the agarwood uses most buyers overlook. It is not glamorous, yet it decides the quality of every stick, cone and bakhoor blend made from it.

Our milled agarwood powder for incense makers starts from $10.30 per 50 g. Before you scale up, burn a test stick from the sample, because powder that looks right in the bag can still smell flat once lit.