Never judge a book by its cover.  This can be said of literally all fragrances: buy them for the dry down, not the opening.  A quality fragrance will tell a story, shift over time, move and feel alive, and in so doing, move the aesthete.  The best of them arrive somewhere completely different from where they started.  Even linear fragrances shift, though, perhaps, less dramatically.  Some openings are soft and subtle, taking their time to work their magic; others announce themselves loudly, like rude neighbors, or your drunk uncle.  And some, like Jo Malone’s Myrrh and Tonka, are pure chaos.  It opens in a mosh pit of bodies and scents whirling about, smashing into each other, seemingly without order or direction.  By the end of the evening, we find ourselves in a warm and refined Mediterranean villa, sipping Amoretto.

The opening seems to have no direction, doesn’t know where to go or what it wants to be.  It pushes and pulls in multiple directions at once: an icy vanilla chai, strong and unmistakable, herby and even medicinal around the edges.  Then a whiff of hay and grass, that somehow provides a little sun, stripping the chill from the air.  It’s grassy and grounded without quite becoming vetiver.  This is the difference between genuine, authentic lavender, and synthetics used in more inexpensive compositions.  This feels like walking through a field full of wild lavender, rather than a handful of crushed  and concentrated petals: airy, warm, open, as big as the Montana sky.    And yet, it is this push and pull with which Myrrh and Tonka seduces: first it’s one thing, then another, and now this—pure enigma.

Then, something interesting happens.  The medicinal note in the opening turns warm, a little dark, somewhat more refined and slightly boozy.  Smooth jazz, led by piano, floats on currents of smoke and Black Sambuca.  The contradiction of chilled alcohol that simultaneously warms due to its alcohol content. Or, more likely, Namibian Myrrh, sourced exclusively for Jo Malone.  Unlike much of the Myrrh associated with fragrance, this leans toward significant refinement, possessing a balsamic quality that not only balances the medicinal coolness, but also tilts the scale to a warmer, more intimate experience: not ceremonial, but still somehow sacred. Myrrh and Tonka would be right at home in the cups of the 16^th century Benedictine monks who supposedly invented the herbaceous liqueur of the same name. 

As the fragrance continues to warm and the tonka, vanilla and almond emerge, the more our sacred drink begins to resemble Amoretto. How did we get here? The wild chaos at the beginning of the evening somehow ends the next day in a meditative state in the Mediterranean. The thin coolness of the icy vanilla, and the licorice sambuca now a thick and extravagant Italian liqueur. The almond softness of the tonka bean settling into the Myrrh’s warmth, rounding every edge that the opening left sharp. Mathilde Bijaoui — the nose behind this composition, described tonka as one of her favorite ingredients not just for perfumery but for cooking: edible, addictive, gourmand without being sickly-sweet. She is right on every count.

And then something Vetiver and Verse were completely unprepared for; in fact, a total sense of disbelief, for which we trust our audience will pardon us as we momentarily break the fourth wall. There is, in the dry down, under all the velvety warmth, something alive.  Something small and warm and furred— an animalic quality so soft and intimate it barely registers. Not the challenging animalic of Sarah Baker’s Riders, not the provocative civet of something intentionally transgressive. This is something you want to pick up. The warmth of a small sleeping creature, alive and present and completely unthreatening. It is the Myrrh’s ancient biological character finally surfacing in the base — resin that has been burned in ceremony for five thousand years still carrying, beneath its refinement, something that remembers from whence it came.

Mathilde Bijaoui has created art in Myrrh and Tonka, emotionally powerful art.  The journey began with a wild disregard for rules, organization, by discarding inhibitions; it was cold and chaotic.  But given time, organization and refinement prevailed, and became something warm and alive. In 1897 Tolstoy expanded our understanding of art: “Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one [person] consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them” (What is Art?). Good art deserves our time, and Myrrh and Tonka is good art.  It does not ask to be understood immediately; it asks to be given a chance, a full reading, before casting judgment.