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. And the Aquilaria crassna Pierre ex Lecomte is only in Vietnam, Cambodia, Thai Lan, Lao, Hai Nan island of China. Vietnam is the origin of these agarwood trees, focus in middle central provinces of Vietnam like Quang Nam, Khanh Hoa, Phu Yen, Binh Dinh, Quang Ngai, Kon Tum. Kinam is very very rare. There is one of the thousands of Aquilaria Crassna trees with hundreds of years may give Kinam Oud. In Vietnam, We often found Kinam Oud in dead agarwood trees that lies underground, steams… And some agarwood hunters also found Kinam Oud in some live ancient agarwood trees with 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.

Different between Kinam Oud and Agarwood

It’s not easy to recognize the wood piece is Kinam oud or high-grade agarwood, special if you are 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 of Kinam oil inside the wood fibers, like honey or wax. In opposite, the high-grade agarwood seems solid resin, dark oud oil, not wet. You can see the picture below for more details different 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, 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 numbness. 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 of Kinam types have 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 of 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 is disappeared swiftly. The smell of agarwood chips is fragrance and normally sweet smell.
With Kinam oud, you only need a very small piece like 1/5 of agarwood chip piece to burning. The Kinam oud smoke has appeared immediately when you put the Kinam piece to the hot agarwood burner. You can see a straight smoke rising up and disappear 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 very impressed 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 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.