A sandalwood tree is barely worth harvesting until it is about thirty years old. The scent lives in the heartwood, and the heartwood takes decades to build.
The prized species is Santalum album, Indian sandalwood. It grows in an unusual way. It is a root hemiparasite, which means it taps into the roots of neighbouring plants for water and nutrients rather than going it alone. That is part of why it grows so slowly, over fifteen to twenty years, with the valuable heartwood only building up after two to three decades.
The oil sits in the yellow-brown heartwood at the centre of the trunk and roots. A young tree has almost none. The historic home is southern India, the Mysore region of Karnataka, and for a long time Mysore sandalwood was the benchmark the whole world measured against.
Here is what most sandalwood marketing leaves out. Centuries of over-cutting pushed wild Santalum album onto the IUCN Red List as Vulnerable, and its trade is now tightly controlled. Genuine old Indian sandalwood is rare and expensive.
So most "sandalwood" you smell today is not old Indian wood at all. It is either plantation-grown Australian sandalwood or a synthetic sandalwood accord built to give the same creamy warmth. That is not a shortcut to complain about. It keeps a slow, threatened tree standing while still giving you the smell you came for.
And the smell is the point. Real sandalwood is soft, creamy and milky, with a warm dry finish and none of the sharpness of other woods. It is quiet and it lasts, which is exactly why it so often sits in the base of a fragrance, holding everything above it in place.
For that creamy-woods signature without the Mysore price, our Santal Thirty Three (our take on Le Labo Santal 33) is a UK-made spray at 35% concentration. See the rest of the Le Labo collection.
