MYRRH AND MUSHROOMS

This morning my sample of the day was D. S. & Durga’s Resin from a 2.5 ml decant that I got on sale from TPC. It didn’t leak or evaporate – hallelujah! I was a little surprised to find that it’s pretty much myrrh straight up, with a halo of sweet, violet powder in the sillage, so I did a search for information about this fragrance. I didn’t find much. There is one fairly negative review on Basenotes, a listing on Fragrantica that says it’s “masculine” and that the notes are “copaiba balsam and myrrh”, and that’s it.

The D.S. & Durga website is one of those overly designed exercises in conformity with the latest trend, complete with a gratuitous “welcome screen” that is late to arrive and overstays its welcome, too many moving parts, light gray or pastel font on an off-white background, and no way to go back once you’ve gone forward. I’ll be glad when the fashion for super-low contrast type and cumbersome animations on perfume websites (and my students’ Powerpoint presentations) goes the way of the dinosaur and the dodo bird. What I did find out from the website, by deduction, is that Resin has been discontinued.

Back to the perfume itself. Copaiba balsam isn’t much of a fragrance on its own, and is used more as a fixative than for its scent, which is rather flat, woody, and a little peppery. Myrrh, on the other hand, is one of the quirkiest scents in the whole realm of perfumery. There’s quite a bit of variation from one variety to another, but what’s constant is a deeply resinous, bitter, leathery, almost industrial, note that’s absolutely unmistakable.

I have written about myrrh before, but sometimes I can have a perfectly formed image of a scent in my mind but cannot find the right words to describe it to others in terms they'd understand. This can be very frustrating. Smelling Resin this morning I had an epiphany in the realm of semantics. Myrrh has a distinct smell of freshly cut “champignon”-type mushrooms. All mushrooms have this scent, but the white and brown button mushrooms have it in a fairly pure form, unobstructed by other notes. It’s what I smell when I’m out walking in the woods and catch a whiff of mushrooms before I see them. It’s the smell of dead leaves turned to flesh, the smell of wet, decaying forest sprouting exuberant saprophytic life. Often I’ll go looking for the source of the scent, and sure enough, there the mushrooms are, hiding under the dead leaves or behind a fern. It’s a pungent, earthy scent and it’s one of the notes in myrrh, stronger in some varieties than others.

It’s funny that the natural mushroom absolute that I have, made from cepes, doesn’t smell at all like fresh mushrooms. In fact, it smells more like soy sauce than anything else. However, my experience with the mushroom note this morning set the gears of inspiration in motion yet again, making me wonder what it would be like to create a perfume based on myrrh and mushrooms. It might turn out to be “not suitable for human use” as the Basenotes reviewer observed about Durga’s Resin (I happen to disagree with this statement), but it would certainly be an interesting exercise in blending related notes.

[Myrrh and mushroom photos from Wikimedia]

MUSINGS ON MYRRH

I think myrrh may be an acquired taste. The first time I smelled it, I didn’t like it at all, but I’ve since come to love and appreciate it. It may also be that there are so many different varieties that it’s necessary to sort through them all before finding the ones that are most appealing. I thought of doing a post on myrrh after trying a sample of Ayala Moriel’s Film Noir, which contains a whopping amount of myrrh in the base. She combines it with chocolate, coffee, cardamom, and some other good things for a perfume that starts out as a pure gourmand and ends up as chocolate flavored myrrh. I love it, especially since it’s a welcome change from her usual culinary herbal blends.

Myrrh is the resin of a thorny desert shrub of the genus Commiphora. The “standard” myrrh is from C myrrha, which grows on the Arabian peninsula and parts of Africa. It has an unmistakable, bitter, resinous, earthy, phenolic, almost animalic and leather-like scent that I’ve come to know and love. I think the tipping point for me was when I was sent a sample of raw myrrh resin from this species along with some other things I'd ordered. I decided to tincture it, and was blown away by how lovely the tincture smelled.

True opoponax is also a type of myrrh, coming from the species Commiphora erythrea or Commiphora opoponax, which grows in the same geographic range as C myrrha. It is a sweeter, more aromatic and incensey version of myrrh, and for that reason is sometimes called “sweet myrrh”. Because it’s sweeter and more conventionally “perfumey”, it makes a good entry-level introduction to the world of myrrh fragrance. Apparently there is also a plant called Opoponax chironeum that grows in the Middle East and Mediterranean region, which is used to produce a resin that is, confusingly enough, also called “opoponax”. To my knowledge, I have not smelled it, but it is reported to be “balsamic” in scent and similar to vetiver. I think the bottom line is that there is a huge amount of confusion as to what is meant by “opoponax”, and there is no telling what sort of opoponax is in your perfume or the essential oil you buy unless the genus and species are specified.

Another type of myrrh is guggul, also known as “bdellium”, which comes from the species Commiphora mukul or Commiphora wrightii. It is endangered in the wild due to over-harvesting, but is now cultivated commercially in northern India and Pakistan, since it is a popular herbal medicine and is used in dhoop-type incense. Guggul resin is the darkest of the three. I have not smelled the essential oil, but judging by the resin, it seems similar to opoponax.

Myrrh is one of the materials that I almost certainly plan to use in the “mystery perfume”, and will definitely use it in some others that are on the drawing board. There’s myrrh in Kingston Ferry, and of course it’s in Kyphi. In the soap version of Kingston Ferry, the myrrh has a surprisingly strong presence, almost giving the impression of bathing in a lake or swimming on a seaweed-strewn beach.

[Botanical illustration from Wikimedia]