Export Documentation for Agarwood — What Ships With Your Order

A safety data sheet is the document that tells everyone who touches your shipment — the forwarder, the airline, the customs officer, your warehouse team — what the material is and how dangerous it is not. It is worth being precise about what kind of document it is, because this is the single most common misunderstanding we encounter: an SDS is not a test report. Nobody analyses a sample to produce one. It is a hazard-communication document authored by the supplier, compiled from composition data and physical measurements, and formatted into sixteen fixed sections that are the same worldwide under the Globally Harmonized System. "MSDS" is simply the older name for the same thing. The terms are used interchangeably in trade and nobody will reject a document for being labelled one rather than the other.

The section that matters commercially is Section 9, and within it a single line: flash point. Agarwood oil is a heavy distillate dominated by sesquiterpenes — agarospirol, β-agarofuran and their relatives — with a boiling range in the high hundreds and closed-cup flash points that sit above the 60 °C line defining a flammable liquid. Depending on where a given distillate lands above that line, GHS puts it in the mildest combustible-liquid band or leaves it unclassified for physical hazard; either way the practical consequence appears in Section 14. And it is the same one: transport as non-dangerous goods, no UN number. We quote the threshold rather than a headline number here on purpose — the figure that governs your declaration is the one on the sheet issued for the product you are buying, not one copied off a website.

It is difficult to overstate how much of a commercial difference that makes, because the default assumption in freight is that anything called an essential oil is flammable. Most are. Citrus oils, eucalyptus, tea tree and peppermint all flash well below 60 °C and travel as UN 1993 Class 3 dangerous goods. That means UN-specification packaging, a certified dangerous-goods packer, a DG surcharge that can run into hundreds of dollars per shipment, and hard quantity limits on passenger aircraft. Agarwood oil sits outside all of that. But you only get the benefit if you can hand the forwarder a document that says so, at the moment they are quoting — which is why the SDS goes out with the quotation rather than with the goods.

The hazards the sheet does record are the ones you would expect from a concentrated aromatic material and should not be dismissed. Undiluted contact causes skin irritation, and the sheet carries a skin sensitisation Category 1 classification, meaning repeated exposure can provoke allergic contact dermatitis in susceptible people. Eye contact causes serious irritation. The material is classified as harmful to aquatic life with long-lasting effects, so it must not go into drains. None of this is unusual for a perfumery raw material, and none of it restricts transport. But it does drive the handling instructions your warehouse team should be working to and the labelling your downstream product may need.

One honest note on scope. Sections 11 and 12 — toxicology and ecology — are thin, because agarwood oil is a natural multi-component extract with no substance-specific toxicological study dossier behind it. That is the ordinary situation for botanical extracts rather than a gap peculiar to us. If you are placing product on the EU market and your compliance team needs those sections populated against REACH or CLP with cited endpoints, that is a request we can work on. But it needs raising at enquiry stage. It is not something anyone can produce over a weekend. A supplier who says otherwise is telling you what you want to hear.

The sheet is issued per product rather than per batch. That is the correct behaviour and occasionally surprises buyers who expect a fresh document with every shipment. Hazard classification is a property of the material, not of the lot. So it only changes when the formulation changes or when the regulatory framework it references is revised. Batch-level information belongs on the certificate of analysis, which is a different document with a different job.

A certificate of analysis is the document that ties a specific physical batch to a specific set of results. That sentence contains the whole point of it. It is worth dwelling on the word "specific", because most of what goes wrong with COAs in this trade goes wrong there. The certificate should carry the batch number, the production date, the sampling quantity, the workshop, and three named signatories — an inspector who ran the checks, a reviewer who verified them, and an approver who authorised release. Those names exist so that a question about a batch two years from now has somebody to ask.

What is actually checked falls into three groups. The sensory panel confirms appearance, aroma, colour and solubility against a written standard — for a natural aromatic this is not a soft assessment, because an experienced assessor catches oxidation, contamination and gross adulteration faster than most instruments. The physicochemical checks measure relative density and refractive index, which for agarwood distillate should fall between 0.910 and 0.990 g/cm³ and between 1.450 and 1.530 respectively. Those two numbers are a surprisingly effective identity screen: a heavily diluted oil drifts out of range, because carriers have different optical and density behaviour from a sesquiterpene-rich distillate. Third, the certificate names characteristic marker compounds — agarospirol and β-agarofuran — and reports total characteristic content.

Here is where we want to be more careful than the category usually is. A certificate of analysis and a GC-MS profile are not the same document, and suppliers who blur the two are not doing buyers a favour. A COA is a release decision: the batch was checked against a specification and passed or did not. A GC-MS profile is an analytical fingerprint showing the compounds present and their relative proportions. The COA answers "is this batch within spec"; the GC-MS answers "what is actually in here". If you are buying oil for perfumery or for resale into a market where authenticity claims will be scrutinised, you want both. And you should ask for them by name rather than assuming that a document headed "Certificate of Analysis" contains chromatographic data. Very often it does not.

The stability note on the certificate is easy to skip and worth reading, because it defines the conditions under which the results remain true. Agarwood oil is stable in sealed containers at normal temperature, but prolonged exposure to air, heat or strong light causes oxidative discolouration, loss of top note and a flattening of the woody character. The certificate states a twenty-four month shelf life against sealed, cool, dark storage — which means the number is a promise about the material, not about how it will be treated in your warehouse. Buyers who decant into part-used containers and leave them on a shelf in a warm room are not covered by that figure. And it is better to know this before rather than after.

Batch records are archived, which is what makes a late request answerable at all. If you are holding a drum from a batch shipped eighteen months ago and your own customer has asked for documentation, send us the batch number and we will tell you what can still be issued against it and what it costs. The batch-record and sensory sections come from the archive and are quick. The instrument sections are not: those can only be run while retention material for that batch still exists, and retention runs three months from dispatch. Which is the practical argument for asking at order stage rather than eighteen months later.

Gas chromatography–mass spectrometry does two things in sequence. The chromatography separates a complex mixture into its individual components by pushing a vaporised sample through a column, where different compounds travel at different speeds and emerge at different times. The mass spectrometry then bombards each emerging component and reads the fragmentation pattern. That is characteristic enough to identify the compound against a spectral library. The output is a chromatogram — a trace of peaks — plus a table listing what each peak is and how large it was relative to the others.

For agarwood this is the closest thing the trade has to an objective identity test. Genuine Aquilaria distillate has a recognisable signature dominated by sesquiterpenes, including agarospirol and β-agarofuran, together with chromone derivatives that are characteristic of resin formation in the wood. The pattern is distinctive enough that dilution with a neutral carrier, cutting with cheaper aromatic woods such as sandalwood or amyris, and outright synthetic reconstruction all show up in the analysis in ways they do not show up to the nose — particularly at the low cut percentages that are commercially most tempting and most common.

That last point deserves emphasis, because the folk belief in this trade is that experience protects you. It does not, or at least not reliably. A skilled assessor will catch a crude fake immediately. A twenty percent cut with a well-chosen carrier, sold at a price that feels like a modest bargain rather than an implausible one, defeats almost everyone by nose alone — and the drydown, where synthetics most often reveal themselves, takes hours to evaluate properly. The defence is not a better nose. It is a chromatogram tied to a batch number and a retained sample of that batch held somewhere it can be independently tested.

We route this to an independent laboratory rather than running it in-house, and the reasoning is worth stating plainly. A GC-MS report exists to answer a question about the supplier. A report authored by the supplier is answering a question about itself. That is a structurally weaker instrument no matter how honest the underlying work. Buyers who have been in this category long enough know this, and buyers who have not are frequently reassured by supplier-issued analytical documents that deserve less weight than they are given. Independent issuance costs more and takes longer. It is worth both.

A word on what the report does not do. It does not establish geographic origin — the chromatographic differences between Guangdong, Nha Trang and Borneo material are real but overlapping, and anyone claiming to prove provenance from a chromatogram is overselling. It does not grade quality, which is a commercial and sensory judgement rather than an analytical one. It does not prove wild versus plantation origin. And a single report with nothing to compare it against is much less informative than the same report set beside a profile of a batch you already know. Ask for it on the first order, keep it, and the value of every subsequent one compounds.

Practically: sample submission to report is usually seven to fourteen working days. So it needs requesting at enquiry stage rather than at dispatch. Where a shipment cannot wait, the workable sequence is to release the goods against the release certificate and follow with the chromatographic report, provided a sealed retention sample of the same batch is held so that the analysis and the delivered material are demonstrably the same lot.

Agarwood-producing Aquilaria species are listed on Appendix II of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. Appendix II is not a ban. It is a permit system: trade is allowed, and it is allowed on the condition that the exporting country issues a document saying the specimens were legally acquired and that the export will not damage the survival of the species in the wild. That document is the export permit, and everything practical about this page follows from one fact — a government issues it, we only apply.

That fact is worth sitting with, because it changes the order in which you should do things. A certificate of analysis is a document we can produce. A GC-MS report is one we can commission. A CITES permit is one we can request, and the timing belongs to somebody else. Suppliers who imply otherwise are describing something outside their control, which is the same failure as a supplier who claims to be handling your import permits.

Plantation material does not remove the requirement, and it is worth being precise about why, because the misunderstanding is common enough to cost people shipments. The listing covers the genus rather than a collection method, so a tree grown on a managed plantation and induced deliberately is still an Aquilaria specimen when it leaves the country. What cultivation changes is the source code recorded on the permit — artificially propagated rather than wild-taken — and the ease of evidencing where the material came from. Both of those help the application. Neither makes it unnecessary.

The listing also carries an annotation defining which parts and derivatives fall inside it, and this is where we are going to be less helpful than you might want, on purpose. That annotation has been amended more than once, the current text is the only one that governs, and any reading of it that we wrote into this page would be a reading you might file a customs declaration against. So we are not going to paraphrase it. Read it at source, on the CITES website, and confirm the reading for your specific product form with your own Management Authority. Then tell us what they told you and we will apply on that basis — and if what they told you means no permit is needed for your form, that is a good outcome and we will say so plainly rather than selling you paperwork.

What we will commit to is this. Tell us at order stage that you need a permit and we make the application part of the order rather than an afterthought. We will tell you what the realistic timing looks like at the point you ask, rather than quoting a number here that we cannot hold against a government office. And we will not tell you that your import side is handled, because it is not ours to handle.