There is a seller in Singapore named Ham Firl. I’m not familiar with where exactly he’s located, but it’s my understanding there’s an area of Singapore with alot of shops that have various valuable trade goods such as woods, oils, and so forth. The name of his business is QT Trading or Qanaat. He sells sandalwood and agarwood attars, and also incense cones, sticks, and bulk wood for burning in bakhoors/incense.
I bought some Cambodian oud from him off eBay for about $19 dollars which is a decent price, and I got it in a few weeks which was decent since I only payed $2 shipping. 3mL of oud could last you a really long time since it’s so strong. In the US highly diluted Burmese oud would cost about $25 dollars from other suppliers. Of course the Cambodian oud is not top quality but it’s still oud. Really high grade oud can cost $90-140 dollars for just a mL.
Oud isn’t commonly available in the US at all outside of San Francisco or other large US cities. It is in a few colognes and perfumes sold in the US though, though I doubt there is much real stuff- Dirty English is a good example of a mainstream cologne with “agarwood”, also M7 and others. If you want to try out a real high-end fragrance, Montale Black Aoud has quite a bit of agarwood, too, but it’s quite expensive, about $100 dollars or so for a large bottle. I only tried the sampler vial, and while it’s quite good, it’s not worth $100 bucks for a large bottle (admittedly, it’s perfume and not cologne- so it lasts a long time), not when I can buy decent agarwood attars for $19 dollars… or make my own.
The scent might not be so exotic and unusual for you, though, since Malaysia and that area has alot of agarwood, sandalwood, and so forth. The smell is similar to sandalwood, just depends on the variety- it also can smell a bit like labdanum or olibanum (Frankincense or rock rose, as we’d call it in the Western world), or even mushrooms like I described earlier. There is a Malaysian/Indonesian variety of agarwood that is quite light and airy and I’ve talked to people who say it gets great reactions from people who have never smelled it before, very intoxicating smell, but also very light.
update: I found out where Ham Firl is. He’s at 109 Riverwalk, in Singapore. I might order some bakhoor wood or Frankincense resin from him one of these days, if I can’t find it elsewhere. He has some really wacky stuff, too, like a car burner for burning wood in your car
(sounds unsafe). What you really need is some kind of vaporizer/hot plate for home, but you’ld have to be careful where you order that from over here or you might get the cops busting your ass (drug paraphenalia).
Anyways, just a thought. BTW… what colognes do you usually wear? Maybe I could recommend you something more mainstream you could find in a designer shop, who knows… You can send me a PM, that’d be OK. See you later!