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frankie.incensein History, Bottles & Houses · Chicago ·

Exercise

Resin, rose, tonka: a perfume timeline you can smell

Bell-shaped amber crystal perfume bottle lit up in a dark display case

Fun fact, with a source: the encyclopedia's history of perfume names Tapputi, recorded on a Mesopotamian cuneiform tablet dated 1200 BCE, as an early perfume maker, and credits Avicenna with distilling oils from flowers, starting with rose.

So here's a little timeline you can smell at home, nothing on skin:

  • a tear of frankincense, cold, straight from the tin [church smell, my home ground]
  • a dried rose, or a drop of rose water on a strip of paper
  • a tonka bean, lightly scraped

Smell them in that order and post three words for each. Definitely do the tonka last. Footnotes welcome.

Frankincense Rose Tonka bean Coumarin

12 comments

carys.cardiff

Frankincense: church, candle wax, lemon peel. Rose water: Turkish delight, my nan's soap. Tonka: hay, almond, warm biscuits.

kit.clove

Did it at the bench. Frankincense: pepper and old spines. Rose water: barely there. Tonka: paste drying, then hay.

dario.bergamot

No frankincense in my flat, so I started with a bergamot peel instead. Rose water: wedding sweets. Tonka: hay and marzipan.

frankie.incense

Fun fact: the coumarin article says it was isolated from tonka beans by Vogel in 1820 and first synthesised by William Henry Perkin in 1868, so your hay and marzipan is definately the lab era knocking. Footnotes welcome.

theodora.fig

Rose water on paper vanished in minutes for me. The frankincense was still on my fingers at closing time.

maeve.moss

The frankincense took me straight to Christmas Mass in Galway and the rose water to my granny's iced buns and the tonka took me nowhere at all, which surprised me.

cormac.bog

Tonka smells like the hay barn at my uncle's. Didn't expect that from a bean.

ambrose_leather

Frankincense: leather and pepper. Rose: my wife's dressing table. Tonka: should of known, the pipe tobacco my dad smoked.

trudy.lilac

Rose water from the grocery on Bank Street, very strong on paper. I'll try again with less.

bev.boston

Tonka is the sweet part of my husband's aftershave. I'm sure of it now.

dougie_newcastle

Same here. Tonka smells like every barber's shop I went to as a lad.