The Sandalwood Crisis: When an Ingredient Becomes Extinct

I keep a small vial of Mysore sandalwood oil in my desk — not to use, but to remember. It was given to me in 2004 by an Indian perfumer who understood, even then, that what we were smelling was an ending. The oil is thick, almost syrupy, with a colour somewhere between pale gold and amber, and its scent is impossible to describe without sounding like a mystic: creamy, woody, faintly sweet, with an almost human warmth that makes you feel as though the material is alive. It is, by any reasonable standard, the most beautiful raw material in perfumery's history. And it is, for all practical purposes, gone.

The near-extinction of Indian sandalwood — Santalum album, the species that produced the Mysore oil revered by perfumers for centuries — is one of the most consequential stories in modern perfumery, and one of the least discussed outside the industry. It involves ecological destruction, government corruption, organised crime, international regulation, and a scramble for alternatives that has reshaped the way perfumers work with wood. It is also, in a quieter register, a story about loss — about what happens when an ingredient that was once the backbone of an entire tradition simply disappears.

The Tree That Built an Industry

Sandalwood has been used in perfumery, religious ceremony, and medicine for at least four thousand years. The Vedic texts mention it. Egyptian embalmers used it. Chinese incense traditions were built on it. But it was the forests of Karnataka, in southern India — particularly the region around Mysore — that produced the sandalwood the world came to consider the standard. Mysore sandalwood oil, steam-distilled from the heartwood of trees at least thirty years old, contained an exceptionally high concentration of santalol — the molecule responsible for sandalwood's characteristic creamy, warm, woody scent — typically around ninety percent, compared to sixty or seventy percent in sandalwood from other regions.

This quality made Mysore sandalwood indispensable to French perfumery. From the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth, sandalwood formed the base of an astonishing number of compositions. It appeared in Guerlain's Samsara, in Chanel's Bois des Iles, in dozens of creamy florals and soft orientals where its warmth and smoothness served as a foundation that made everything above it sound better. Perfumers spoke of sandalwood the way architects speak of marble — it was the noble material, the one that elevated everything it touched.

India recognised the value of its sandalwood forests and, in theory, protected them. The Karnataka government nationalised the sandalwood trade in 1792, making the trees state property regardless of whose land they grew on. This was meant to prevent overexploitation. In practice, it had the opposite effect. By removing private ownership incentives to cultivate and protect the trees, nationalisation created a system in which sandalwood was simultaneously too valuable to leave alone and too regulated to manage sustainably. The trees became, in effect, a commons that everyone exploited and no one maintained.

We treated Mysore sandalwood as though it were infinite. It was not infinite. It was simply old — centuries of accumulated growth that we consumed in decades.

The Collapse

The crisis accelerated dramatically in the 1990s. Illegal logging, driven by enormous demand from the fragrance and incense industries, stripped Karnataka's forests at a rate that far exceeded any capacity for regeneration. The notorious sandalwood smuggler Veerappan, who operated in the forests of southern India for over two decades, became a symbol of the crisis — a bandit who funded his operations by felling and selling sandalwood trees to international buyers. But Veerappan was merely the most visible figure in a much larger system. Corruption at every level of the forestry bureaucracy facilitated illegal harvesting on a massive scale. By some estimates, India's sandalwood reserves declined by over eighty percent between 1970 and 2000.

The Indian government's response was to restrict exports, which drove prices to extraordinary levels. By the early 2000s, genuine Mysore sandalwood oil was selling for prices that rivalled those of the most expensive essential oils on earth — upwards of two thousand dollars per kilogram and rising. By 2010, even this price was largely theoretical, because there was almost no oil available to purchase. The forests were effectively depleted. The distilleries that had operated for generations closed or switched to other materials. An ingredient that had been a staple of the perfumer's palette for a century had, within a single generation, become functionally extinct as a commercial material.

CITES — the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species — eventually listed Indian sandalwood, further restricting international trade. This was necessary, but it came too late to prevent the collapse and too early to allow recovery. Santalum album is a slow-growing species. A tree must be at least twenty-five to thirty years old before its heartwood produces oil of sufficient quality, and sixty years is considered optimal. Even if aggressive replanting had begun in the 1990s, the first commercially viable harvests would not have arrived until the 2020s. The timeline of ecological recovery does not align with the timeline of commercial demand, and this misalignment is at the heart of the sandalwood crisis.

The Search for Alternatives

The collapse of the Indian supply forced the industry to look elsewhere, and the most significant alternative came from an unlikely source: Australia. Santalum spicatum, the Australian sandalwood, had been harvested for centuries by Indigenous Australians and traded with Chinese merchants since the early nineteenth century, but it had always been considered inferior to Indian sandalwood — lower in santalol content, drier and less creamy in character, lacking the velvety warmth that made Mysore oil so prized. As Indian supplies dwindled, however, Australian sandalwood underwent a rapid reappraisal.

The Western Australian government, to its credit, managed its sandalwood resources more sustainably than India had managed its own, implementing harvest quotas and encouraging plantation cultivation. Companies like Quintis, formerly TFS Corporation, invested heavily in Santalum album plantations in the tropical north, aiming to produce Indian-species sandalwood oil on Australian soil. By the 2020s, these plantations were beginning to yield commercial quantities of oil, though the quality, while good, was a matter of debate among perfumers — plantation-grown sandalwood tends to have a slightly different character than wild-harvested, possibly due to differences in soil, climate, and the stress factors that contribute to heartwood development in wild trees.

New Caledonian sandalwood, from Santalum austrocaledonicum, also entered the market — a softer, milkier oil that some perfumers found appealing for certain compositions. And Vanuatu began developing its own sandalwood industry. But none of these alternatives, however promising, fully replicated the character of old-growth Mysore sandalwood. They were good. Some were very good. They were not the same.

The Synthetic Question

The other response to the sandalwood crisis has been synthetic. The fragrance industry's large chemical houses — Firmenich, Givaudan, Symrise, IFF — invested heavily in developing synthetic sandalwood molecules that could replicate or at least evoke the natural material. The results have been remarkably successful from a commercial standpoint. Molecules like Javanol, developed by Givaudan, and Polysantol from Firmenich offer a creamy, woody profile that reads as sandalwood in most compositions. Ebanol, another Givaudan molecule, provides a richer, more textured sandalwood effect. These synthetics are used in virtually every modern fragrance that lists sandalwood in its notes.

The synthetics are very good — good enough to fool most noses, most of the time. But there is a quality in real Mysore sandalwood that no molecule has yet captured: a sense of depth, of presence, almost of sentience. The natural material breathes. The synthetics hold their breath.

For most consumers, the distinction is academic. If you spray a modern sandalwood fragrance — Le Labo's Santal 33, say, or Tam Dao by Diptyque — the sandalwood effect is convincing, pleasant, and perfectly functional. You would need to smell it alongside genuine Mysore oil to notice what is missing, and since genuine Mysore oil is nearly impossible to obtain, the comparison rarely arises. The market has, in a sense, forgotten what real sandalwood smelled like, and in forgetting, has become content with the substitute.

What Loss Teaches Us

The sandalwood crisis is a cautionary tale, and its lessons extend far beyond a single ingredient. Rosewood oil, once common in perfumery, is now severely restricted due to deforestation in Brazil. Haitian vetiver, one of the finest vetiver oils in the world, faces chronic supply instability due to political upheaval and unsustainable harvesting practices. Agarwood — oud — is following a trajectory disturbingly similar to sandalwood's, with wild Aquilaria trees now critically endangered across Southeast Asia. The pattern repeats: an ingredient becomes valuable, demand outstrips supply, regulation arrives too late, and the industry adapts by moving to alternatives while quietly mourning what has been lost.

I think the deeper lesson of the sandalwood crisis is about the relationship between perfumery and the natural world — a relationship that the industry has historically treated as extractive rather than reciprocal. Perfumery takes from nature: jasmine from Grasse, rose from Turkey, vetiver from Haiti, sandalwood from India. For most of its history, it has taken without much thought for what it was taking from. The sandalwood crisis forced the industry, for the first time, to confront the possibility that the materials it depends on are not inexhaustible, and that the art of perfumery has an ecological dimension that cannot be indefinitely ignored.

There are reasons for cautious optimism. Plantation cultivation, sustainable harvesting certifications, and industry-wide initiatives like the Nagoya Protocol on access and benefit-sharing are beginning to change the way the fragrance industry sources its natural materials. Several Indian states have relaxed their sandalwood regulations to encourage private plantation development. Australian plantations continue to expand. The timeline is long — decades, not years — but the direction, at least, seems right.

An art form that destroys its own materials is an art form with a deadline. The sandalwood crisis was the first warning. Whether the industry heeds it will determine what perfumery smells like in fifty years.

I still open that vial from 2004 occasionally. The oil has deepened with age, becoming richer and more complex, as genuine sandalwood tends to do. Each time I smell it, I am aware that I am experiencing something that most people entering perfumery today will never encounter in its authentic form. This is not nostalgia. It is grief — for a material, for a forest, for a dimension of perfumery that existed for millennia and was consumed in a single century. The vial grows lighter each year. Someday it will be empty. And the scent it held will exist only in the memory of those who were fortunate enough to have known it.