Myrrh is named for its taste, not its smell. The word traces to the Semitic root murr, meaning bitter, and Encyclopedia.com tracks it through Arabic and Hebrew into Greek and then English. The smell is another matter entirely: warm, balsamic, a little liquorice, a little medicinal.
The material is the hardened gum resin of Commiphora myrrha, a small thorny tree in the Burseraceae family, the same family that gives us frankincense. Cut the bark and the sap bleeds out, then dries into hard tears. Even the genus name confesses the resin's first job: Encyclopedia.com notes Commiphora likely joins the Greek words for embalming gum and bearing. Premiere Peau's history piece calls it the bitter resin of the pharaohs.
The ancients also used it as medicine, and modern chemistry worked out why that was not superstition. In 1996, Piero Dolara and colleagues at the University of Florence reported that furanoeudesma-1,3-diene, a molecule in myrrh, binds to opioid receptors in the brain. Naloxone, the drug used to reverse morphine, cancelled its pain-killing effect in mice. The American Chemical Society later made it a Molecule of the Week on the strength of that finding.
In modern perfumery the reference point is Myrrh & Tonka by Jo Malone London, launched in 2016 in the Cologne Intense line and composed by Mathilde Bijaoui. Fragrantica lists lavender up top, myrrh through the heart, then tonka, vanilla and almond at the base. Resin first, dessert second.
One distinction shelf tags blur: amber is a convention, a blend perfumers simply agree to call amber. Myrrh is a thing. It comes off a specific tree, and you can hold a lump of it in your hand. If you want warm resin with a signature rather than a generic glow, myrrh is the one with a passport.
Myrrh & Amber is our version of that Jo Malone warmth, a 35% Extrait spray backed by the 60-day money-back promise. The wider Jo Malone-inspired collection is here, ranked in our Jo Malone dupes roundup.
