A stone fireplace, well-worn leather, mahogany, and lots of light: the room scented with tonka bean is built for romance. With notes of almond, vanilla, cherry, and tobacco, the sumptuous fragrance has rounded out the ambience of elegant spaces for decades, evoking a rugged American hearth inflected with Italian villa mystique. The essence also happens to be used to extend the life of perfumes. So if it’s lingering, it might be tonka.
If you haven’t already seen it on the ingredients list of a luxe scent or candle, let us be the first to tell you: You will. In honor of National Fragrance Day, let’s pause to consider the hype, and of course, the smell itself.
First: The hype. Yes, the compound derived from the cumaru tree or dipteryx odorata, native to Central and South America, has been pulling weight in the scent world for about as long as perfume has been a thing (pretty literally). But it’s not exactly a household name, either. At least not yet. Right now, the tonka bean market is booming, and demand is only expected to climb as its uses expand (to aromatherapy, cosmetics), and awareness around its benefits grows. As a spice, it’s coveted by chefs.
It’s also considered toxic, and is in fact banned in the U.S. But don’t worry: In the forms in which we typically encounter it, tonka bean is perfectly fine. “As long as you don’t use a copious amount of it—obviously a copious amount could cause death—it really is delicious,” Thomas Raquel, the head pastry chef at Le Bernardin told the BBC in 2017. And, thus, as the New York Times put it last summer, the tonka bean still shows up on dessert menus. It’s just that good.
As a scent, it has no drawbacks. The rich nuttiness of the coumarin extracted from the tonka beans is a binding velvet to the sharper notes often layered on top. Alone, tonka is described as “warm, welcoming, or even seductive” but also “formidable,” as Alpha Aromatics put it, “both versatile and timeless.” In other words, tonka is complex: spicy, earthy and sweet. “It’s classified as a gourmand scent,” says Jane Bleecker, candlemaker at Hazeltine Scent Co., “which is basically anything edible: vanilla, coffee, almond.” If you didn’t already know, gourmands are in, and among them, tonka is king. “It’s the fancy gourmand scent note,” says Bleecker.
It’s also sexy. As François Demachy, Dior’s Perfumer-Creator, once said, «The tonka bean is a concentrate of sensations and aromas. It is dual, it has a multifarious seduction. Its milky sweetness invariably attracts. But it also reveals a soft yet surprising bitterness, when you taste it.»
Get Your Own Tonka Candle
McGroger George Home Tonka Bean Double Wick Candle — 380g
Anthropologie Scalloped Gourmand Sweet Tonka & Vanilla Glass Candle
Jo Malone London Myrrh & Tonka Candle at Nordstrom
Recently, Tonka played itself in the pop-sensation All Fours, a novel by Miranda July. In the book, the protagonist holes up in a dumpy hotel in Monrovia, California, and, for reasons to do with plot, spends $20,000 redecorating room 321. The designer enlisted by the nameless protagonist is a local up-and-comer with big ideas and really good taste; for inspiration, she’s told to look to the Parisian hotel Le Bristol. The result is understated “opulence.” In the bathroom is a tonka bean scented soap, made by nuns. And so, the redecorated room, emblematic of acts of love, elegance and aspiration, smells like tonka beans.
This is, as we like to say, a teachable moment: A scent is a powerful tool for establishing a mood and enhancing the story a space can tell. Even calling out the name of the tonka bean in the novel casts a spell.
Bleecker was so taken by the book and the mood set by July’s special room, she decided to make a tonka scented candle. “I was obsessed with it,” says Bleecker. At the time, she’d been looking for a new candle to make for fall. “Something kind of cozy, warm and relaxing, and it just kind of clicked,” she says. The product is a candle called Room 321. “I did feel like [July’s character] went into that room as one person and came out another; the room was special for the sake of being special.”
To arrive at its scent profile, Bleecker had to work some alchemical magic: Starting with the feeling the tonka bean elicited while reading, she built a fragrance from a mix of natural and synthetic ingredients to match. “I was trying to bring up what I imagined as I was reading the book. I wanted it to tie into the whole aesthetic of the room—feminine but luxurious and comfortable; kind of fancy and special.”
Fancy, luxurious, comfortable. Spicy, sweet, seductive. Special. The tonka bean, in fiction and real life, brings the mood to any room it enters.
