Myrrh & Tonka

Myrrh & Tonka is Jo Malone's meditation on smoke, sweetness, and skin-warmth, orchestrated with unexpected restraint by Mathilde Bijaoui. This isn't the overtly gourmand direction you'd expect from such a dessert-forward ingredient list—instead, the myrrh holds court with its church-incense gravitas whilst the tonka and almond create a marzipan-adjacent richness that never tips into bakery territory. The lavender opening feels almost like a decoy, aromatic and slightly medicinal, before it surrenders completely to the resinous heart. What emerges is something genuinely compelling: a spiced, creamy amber that wears close to the skin like cashmere soaked in smoke and almond milk.

The fragrance skews toward those who appreciate comforting scents with backbone—people who want to smell enveloped rather than announced. There's an androgynous elegance here that works equally well on someone in tailoring or knitwear, particularly during the colder months when its warmth becomes an asset rather than a weight. It's the scent of afternoon light through stained glass, of wooden library chairs worn smooth by decades of use, of expensive candles burning in rooms with good bones. Bijaoui manages to keep the sweetness in check with that persistent myrrh smoke, preventing the vanilla and tonka from becoming cloying. This is Jo Malone operating at a more sophisticated frequency than their typical citrus-forward crowd-pleasers—still accessible, but with genuine character beneath the approachability.