A short history of resins in perfumery, from Egypt to Grasse

Resins have supplied perfumery with its warm, fixative base since at least the third millennium BCE, when Egyptians burned frankincense and myrrh in temple ritual and blended them into embalming compounds and scented unguents. Trade in these resins, alongside storax and later benzoin, moved along the Incense Route through southern Arabia into the classical Mediterranean, then through medieval Islamic and maritime networks that carried Sumatran and Siamese benzoin west under the Arabic name lubān jāwī. By the sixteenth century, Grasse in southern France had turned from leather tanning to scenting gloves with resins and florals, and by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was Europe’s perfumery center. The nineteenth-century isolation of coumarin and vanillin let chemists stabilize the resinous, sweet “amber” base that still defines much of modern perfumery.

Egypt: resin smoke for gods and the dead

Egyptian temple ritual burned frankincense and myrrh daily, and both resins appear in the Ebers Papyrus among prescriptions and compound recipes. Queen Hatshepsut’s expedition to the land of Punt, around 1470 BCE, is recorded on the walls of her mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahari bringing back live resin trees alongside sacks of dried resin, evidence of how highly the material was valued.

The most elaborate Egyptian resin compound was kyphi, a kneaded incense of resins, wine, honey and dried fruit burned at nightfall and described centuries later by Plutarch. Its base ingredients overlapped heavily with what a perfumer today would call frankincense and myrrh, both harvested from trees native to the southern Arabian and Horn of Africa coasts.

The incense route and the classical Mediterranean

Frankincense and myrrh moved north from Dhofar and the Hadhramaut by camel caravan and by sea, a trade substantial enough to shape the economies of pre-Islamic Arabian kingdoms. Greek and Roman writers treated the resins as luxury goods: Theophrastus catalogued aromatic materials in On Odours, and Pliny the Elder recorded frankincense prices and adulteration methods in the Natural History.

The same resin economy underlies the incense formula of Exodus 30:34, which combines stacte, onycha, galbanum and frankincense for use at the Jerusalem temple, a recipe scholars still debate ingredient by ingredient. Greek perfumers also worked with storax, the balsam of Liquidambar orientalis, valued then as now for a warm, cinnamic-balsamic note distinct from frankincense’s drier, terpenic character.

What did ancient perfumed oils actually smell like?

Ancient Mediterranean perfumery was almost entirely oil-based rather than alcohol-based, since distilled alcohol was not yet in use for fragrance. Resins were macerated or dissolved into olive, almond or moringa oil along with spices, flowers and animal products, producing thick, long-lasting unguents rather than the light sprays familiar today.

Because storax, frankincense and myrrh all carry balsamic, resinous facets alongside sweeter or greener top notes, these ancient blends likely read as heavier and more incense-like than most modern fine fragrance, closer to what a contemporary nose would call a church or temple accord than to a floral eau de toilette.

Resins on the medieval trade routes: from Sumatra to Venice

Benzoin entered the western perfumery tradition later than frankincense or myrrh, arriving through Arab maritime trade from Sumatra and mainland Southeast Asia. Arab traders called it lubān jāwī, “frankincense of Java,” a name that European languages garbled into benjuí, benjoin and eventually benzoin, a history traced in detail in the word benzoin: from lubān jāwī to benjuí, benjamin and benzene.

Venice, Genoa and later Marseille functioned as the European gateways for this trade, receiving resins from Levantine and Indian Ocean intermediaries and redistributing them to apothecaries and perfumers across the continent. By the late medieval period, benzoin, storax and labdanum sat alongside frankincense and myrrh as standard stock in any European apothecary handling aromatics, valued as much for its supposed medicinal virtues as for its scent.

How did Grasse become the capital of perfumery?

Grasse’s rise had little to do with resins at first. The town was a center of leather tanning, and its glove-makers began scenting hides with local lavender and rosemary and with imported resins and musks to counter the smell of the tanning process, a fashion associated with Catherine de’ Medici’s Italian entourage in the sixteenth century. Grasse’s microclimate, well suited to roses, jasmine and orange blossom, gave the town an additional advantage as flower cultivation for perfumery expanded.

By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the gantiers parfumeurs guild had effectively become a perfumery guild, and Grasse’s role shifted from tanning to fragrance production, a position it consolidated through the nineteenth century as French perfume houses established buying relationships with its growers and distillers.

The synthetic turn: vanillin, coumarin and the amber accord

Nineteenth-century organic chemistry transformed what resins could do in a formula. William Henry Perkin synthesized coumarin in 1868, and Wilhelm Haarmann and Karl Reimer worked out a synthesis of vanillin from coniferin in 1874, giving perfumers cheap, consistent versions of notes that natural tolu balsam and vanilla pods, and benzoin’s own vanillin content, had only supplied in small and variable amounts.

Houbigant’s Fougère Royale (1882) and Guerlain’s Jicky (1889) were among the first widely known perfumes to lean on these new synthetics alongside natural resins. The pairing matured into what the trade now calls the amber accord, a warm base built from labdanum, benzoin, vanillin and often coumarin, most famously deployed in Guerlain’s Shalimar in 1925.

A timeline of resins in perfumery

What resins still anchor perfumes today?

Labdanum, benzoin and frankincense remain in active use, now most often as absolutes, resinoids or tinctures rather than the raw lumps apothecaries once sold. Chypre structures still lean on labdanum for warmth, oriental and amber compositions still pair benzoin with vanillin, and incense-focused fragrances still draw directly on frankincense and myrrh.

What has changed is precision. Modern gas chromatography lets perfumers identify and standardize compounds such as benzoic acid, benzyl benzoate and coniferyl benzoate within a given resin batch, something Theophrastus and the Grasse glove-makers could only judge by nose.

• perfumery
• history
• resins
• benzoin
• amber