How do you elevate sweet vanilla notes? Tonka bean is the perfect material to elevate gourmand notes from simple vanilla into a much more complex and nuanced experience.

Tonka beans themselves smell sweet and vanillic but with a distinctly nutty facet in the almond/ marizpan direction. To me while vanilla is sweet, smooth and a bit syrupy in texture, Tonka is sweet but dusty and dry. 

Tonka beans are a wrinkled dark seed that are part of the pea family which grow in South America. The main component chemical giving tonka bean its scent is coumarin, the first aroma chemical that was synthetically produced, first synthesized back in 1820. While it gives tonka bean it’s characteristic scent because of high concentrations, coumarin naturally occurs in plants all over the world. Woodruff, Sweetgrass, clover and northern bedstraw all get their notably sweet profile from their coumarin content. 

Coumarin and tonka bean are a main element of the fougère family, a classic profile highlighting tonka, oakmoss & lavender with other materials to give distinctness. Fougeres can often feel vintage and handsome as they dominated men’s scents during the 20th century.

In our line Grasslands is a fougere adjacent scent that uses tonka bean and oakmoss but replaces the barbershop like lavender with mimosa blossom to give a softer and lightly floral touch to the scent. 

If you love a sweet scent but find many gourmands too juvenile, look for Tonka Bean to add sophistication to the scent.