It was hypothesised/claimed that sweat from workers hands get soaked by wood during sorting/breaking altering the optimum smell of Oud in Assam brother Ammar. I am bringing in the perspective of new readers/oud learners/explorers when they come to prominent forums and read such claims they automatically want to run off. So an answer or mythbusting by a prominent distiller will help to clarify this doubt for most because as users we can only rely on their word and pictures ? Only a lucky few have seen an actual distillation going on and what comes out of it. Pictures mean cannot prove anything in the world of Ouds. The truth is very far. An alien destination.
Like most things it is important to understand where the balance in the pendulum occurs in this discussion, there is the exaggerated view that you have quoted on one side and then the view that denies any impact from skin contact on the opposite. In the middle is where reality is. Skin contact is more of an issue with the tiny 2.5ml bottles, the reason for that being that such a bottle is made up of possibly a hundred odd swipes. one can actually imagine that every time a small residue goes back into the bottle and over time, in that small 2.5ml bottle there is going to be a fair build up of skin residue, be it skin oils, dead skin, dirt etc. This can spoil the oil as the contaminent vs oil is fairly high.
However distillers using their hands to handle the wood into the pot, etc, it is totally BS to say that such contact will ruin an oil, which at that point is still trapped in pours inside wood fibres. There is more chance that the negative energy created by these lies upon lies ruins the oil than there is of the distiller going about doing his work in his distillery. Maybe soon there will be a video where someone is getting scrubbed down before they jump into the surgical overalls whilst 'distilling' the next great oil.
As with regards to the picture and videos that many have seen, where the distiller touches the palm of the hand on the water then rubs it off on the teardrop collector to collect the oil. Then it is important to note, that this happens in older distilleries on the left over hydrosol and pot water after the majority of the oils has been collected without skin contact. This process does not occour with the collection of all the oil. They have been using this method for years to collect the last drops of oil left in the hydrosol. Some distillers do not add these last drops of oil to the main collection, rather the use it for personal use, others do add it. This is bad practice, however the quantity of skin that will transfer in that process is minute compared to the over all oil collected. Skin particles to oudh oil isn't exactly the same as lemon is to milk. Therefore like i said at the beginning there needs to be a balanced view to these issues and not an exaggerated motive driven perspective that freaks the consumer out to only buy the new oil that was distilled with surgical overalls.
