The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
Bois d'Agar Très Très Noir arrived in 2022 from Jimmy Bodin, a self-taught perfumer who worked under the Jousset Parfums umbrella through a short-lived label known as The Unleashed Apothecary. The name says it plainly: agarwood, very, very black. Bodin built the composition around a stack of regional ouds, placing Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Thai distillates together in a single bottle. The material itself sets the tone, dense and resinous, slow to move on skin, giving each layer time to register before the next surfaces. The fragrance is presented as a handmade extrait, a format that traditionally suits materials this heavy, letting the woods unspool at their own pace rather than evaporating in the opening hour.
What's unusual here is the oud triangulation. Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Thai ouds appear together, supported by manuka wood, cypriol (nagarmotha), and Indian gurjun balsam. That last ingredient does quiet structural work, adding a leathery, almost rubbery undertone that keeps the composition from floating into pure incense. Each regional oud brings its own accent, and layering them inside a single extrait forces those differences to negotiate in real time on the skin.
The evolution
The opening reads sharp and immediate, with cypriol's earthy smoke meeting manuka's clean woodiness. There's a camphorated edge here that announces the composition's intent without apology. The cypriol reads as something closer to burning root than to a polite incense stick, dense and grounded, while the manuka offers a slightly medicinal brightness that counterbalances the smoke. As the composition settles, the three ouds begin to assert themselves, though not as a single wall of scent. The Vietnamese oud, described as earthy, spicy, and camphor-like, brings the deepest layer. The Cambodian oud adds a clay-like dryness that thickens the middle. The Thai oud contributes a leathery quality that softens the edges. Gurjun balsam threads through all three, its leather note acting as connective tissue throughout the wear.
Cultural impact
Bois d'Agar Très Très Noir arrived in 2022 as part of a limited release from The Unleashed Apothecary, Jimmy Bodin's short-lived label operating under the Jousset Parfums umbrella. The choice to stack Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Thai ouds in a single composition is uncommon in Western niche perfumery, where single-origin ouds or blended oud accords tend to dominate.
