Different between Kinam Oud and Agarwood

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What is Kinam Oud?

Firstly, before talking about the differences between Kinam and agarwood, we should talk about what is Kinam Oud for your understanding. So, Kinam Oud is a special wood that contains special resinous in the agarwood tree. Kinam Oud is only formed in the core wood of Aquilaria Crassna Pierre ex Lecomte. The Aquilaria Crassna Pierre ex Lecomte is only in Vietnam, Cambodia, Thai Lan, Lao, and Hai Nan island of China. Vietnam is the origin of these agarwood trees, focusing on the middle central provinces of Vietnam like Quang Nam, Khanh Hoa, Phu Yen, Binh Dinh, Quang Ngai, and Kon Tum. Kinam is very very rare. There is one of the thousands of Aquilaria Crassna trees with hundreds of years that may give Kinam Oud. In Vietnam, We often find Kinam Oud in dead agarwood trees that lie underground, steams… Some agarwood hunters also found Kinam Oud in some live ancient agarwood trees 100-200 years old in forests.

For more information about Kinam Agarwood, please read this post:

Kinam oud – A treasure is not easy to find and buy

See our Kinam Oud products.

Differences between Kinam Oud and Agarwood

It’s not easy to recognize whether the wood piece is Kinam oud or high-grade agarwood, special if you are an amateur. However, we can share some of our know-how and experiences to recognize the differentiation between Kinam oud and agarwood. We separate into 03 methods: Without burning, burning and testing in a biological laboratory.

1. Firstly, without burning Kinam – Agarwood method:

Checking the wood appearance: The easy way is to use the microscope to see the surface of wood pieces. If they are Kinam oud, you can see full Kinam oil inside the wood fibers, like honey or wax. On the opposite, the high-grade agarwood seems solid resin, dark oud oil, not wet. You can see the picture below for more details difference between kinam oud and agarwood:

The next tip, chew the wood piece. If the Kinam Oud, you can feel several tastes like sweet, bitter, sour, and acrid. If the agarwood is, you often feel the bitter taste only. In addition, you also feel the numbness of your tongue if the wood piece is Kinam Oud. Agarwood cannot make your tongue numb. And because of Kinam oud is softer than agarwood, so you can feel soft when you chew.
The last tip for checking Kinam oud without burning: You should smell the wood chips at normal environment temperature. All Kinam types are full of Kinam oud oil inside, so they have a strong fragrance at environment temperature. If you keep the Kinam piece in the plastic bag. After 1-2 days, you can smell it through the plastic bag, don’t need to open the bag. And there are not all high-grade agarwood type fragrance at low temperature like Kinam oud.

2. Secondly, burning Kinam Oud and Agarwood method:

If you burn the agarwood chips, you will see a spiral smoke. And the smoke from agarwood chips disappeared swiftly. The smell of agarwood chips is fragrant and normally sweet.
With Kinam oud, you only need a very small piece like 1/5 of the agarwood chip piece to burn. The Kinam oud smoke appears immediately when you put the Kinam piece on the hot agarwood burner. You can see a straight smoke rising and disappearing slowly. The smell of Kinam oud is very different from agarwood smell. It’s like a compound of fruit, coffee, and milk…Kinam oud smell is a very impressive fragrance and difficult to forget. You should try it one time if you are an agarwood lover.

3. Testing Kinam oud in a biological laboratory.

The Japanese scientist found in Kinam Oud pieces that were collected in Nha Trang a new spirovetivane type sesquiterpene in 2006. It is (4R,5R,7R)-1(10)-Spirovetiven-11-ol-2-one sesquiterpene. Until now, they have not found this sesquiterpene in agarwood yet. So this sesquiterpene might be used as one of the important indications of quality evaluation of Kynam. This sesquiterpene has the highest grade significantly induced the brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) exon III–V mRNA expression in rat cortical cells.