The American FDA banned tonka bean from food in 1954. Perfumers never stopped using it for a day.
Tonka bean is the small, black, wrinkled seed of a South American tree, Dipteryx odorata, known locally as cumaru. Shave it and it smells like a warm dessert: vanilla, almond, fresh hay, a touch of cinnamon and caramel. Almost all of that smell comes from one compound, coumarin.
Coumarin is also why it was banned. In high doses it caused liver damage in lab animals, so the FDA pulled tonka from the American food supply and never put it back. The twist, as chemists at McGill University have pointed out, is that a person would need to eat something like 2,400 tonka-flavoured desserts in a single day to reach a genuinely risky dose. The ban is widely seen as overcautious. Tonka is eaten happily across Europe and Canada, and it is legal everywhere in perfume.
Its bigger legacy is on your shelf. Synthetic coumarin, one of the first lab-made aroma materials, built the fougere family. Houbigant's Fougere Royale, launched in 1882, used it to create a new kind of scent, fern-like and mossy, and it founded a whole fragrance family that still rules the men's aisle today.
In a bottle, tonka is a base note. It sits low and warm and adds a soft, sweet, almond-and-hay hum underneath vanilla, tobacco and amber. It is the quiet reason a lot of cosy fragrances feel cosy.
Tonka is the warm heart of our Tobacco Vanilla (our take on Tom Ford Tobacco Vanille), a UK-made spray at 35% concentration where tonka sits under tobacco and vanilla exactly as it should. More in the best Tom Ford Tobacco Vanille dupes in the UK.
