What does myrrh smell like?
Reviewed by Lucy Grant, co-owner and fragrance reviewer — 24 September 2026
Myrrh smells balsamic and dry: resinous, a little spicy, with a sweetness nearer to toffee or amber than to sugar, and an odd edge that one industry database describes as metallic and mushroom-like. It is a resin, not a wood or a flower, and in perfume it usually sits in the base, the last tier to show on skin.
It is not common on note lists. In Sentia’s catalogue, 46 of 1,228 published pyramids name it, about 3.7%, and 33 of those put it in the base.
The shrub
A thorny shrub, and three things in one resin
Myrrh is the resin of Commiphora myrrha, which a 2025 paper describes as a spiny shrub with prominent thorns, built for dry places with little rain and shallow, rocky soil. It grows mainly in northeast Africa, in Somalia and Kenya, and in parts of the Arabian Peninsula. Its flowers are small and yellow-red; its fruits are small, brown and egg-shaped.
What is collected from it is called an oleo-gum-resin, because it is three materials at once:
- 1A gum that dissolves in water.
- 2A resin that dissolves in alcohol.
- 3A volatile oil the small fraction you actually smell, mostly furanosesquiterpenes.
That oil is a small share of the lump. A 2005 study drew 3.2% of the resin’s weight off as oil with carbon dioxide, and 2.8% by distilling it with water. The rest is the gum and the resin, which stay behind.
Kavallieratos et al., Plants (2025) (read in full, 24 September 2026) and Marongiu et al., Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry (2005) (abstract only).
In the oil
Three molecules carry most of it
The clearest description of the oil on its own comes from an industry database used by people who buy fragrance materials. It files myrrh oil under the balsamic odour type, at medium strength, and describes it, at full strength, as “balsamic dry spicy amber toffee metallic resinous mushroom”. Read that list slowly and you have the smell: the balsam and resin at the core, the dry spice and the toffee-amber warmth around it, and the strange metallic, mushroom note at the edge that keeps myrrh from being merely sweet.
Chemists measure it rather than describe it, and two analyses twenty years apart agree on what is in it. Both put the same three molecules at the top of the list, all from a family called furanosesquiterpenes, and in the 2025 oil that family made up 86.1% of everything the instrument identified:
| Compound | 2005 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| Furanoeudesma-1,3-diene | 34.9% | 40.2% |
| Curzerene | 8.5% | 26.1% |
| Lindestrene | 12.9% | 12.9% |
| Germacrone | 5.8% | — |
The big gap on curzerene is partly the method, not the plant: the 2025 authors note that another compound in the resin, isofuranodiene, turns into curzerene at the temperatures used to distil the oil and to analyse it. And samples differ. A 2016 study of the same shrub under its older name, Commiphora molmol, found furanoeudesma-1,3-diene and menthofuran as the main components of its oil. Myrrh is a plant product, not a formula.
One honest limit: none of these papers says what any single molecule smells like on its own. They weigh the molecules. The description above is of the whole oil.
The Good Scents Company, industry database, myrrh oil entry; Marongiu et al., Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry (2005), Kavallieratos et al., Plants (2025) and Mahboubi & Kashani, Pharmaceutical Biology (2016).
Myrrh and frankincense are not the same resin
They are named together so often that people take them for one thing. They are two. Frankincense is the resin of Boswellia carteri; what a 2018 study calls “true myrrh” is the resin of Commiphora myrrha. The same study puts their shared history at 2800 BCE and onward: skin sores, wounds and teeth in traditional medicine, the balms of mummification, and “also as incense and perfumes”. Burning them in places of worship, it notes, runs across religions, and the authors went as far as measuring the smoke of both inside a seventeenth-century church.
A 2005 review of myrrh chemistry opens the same way: myrrh “has been used throughout history in incense and as a perfume”. So the association is real, and old. The plants are not the same.
Ljaljević Grbić et al., Journal of Ethnopharmacology (2018) and Hanuš et al., Biomedical Papers (2005), from their published abstracts.
Where it goes
Mostly a base note
Myrrh is a minor note by count. Only 46 pyramids in the catalogue list it, from 15 houses, out of 1,228 with a top, heart and base. What they agree on is placement: 33 of those 46 put it in the base.
| Note | Top | Heart | Base |
|---|---|---|---|
| Myrrh46 pyramids | 4% | 24% | 72% |
Beside it
Smoke and resin keep it company
Incense is its closest companion: 41% of myrrh pyramids list frankincense or incense, a pairing found on only 14% of pyramids in general. Oud follows at 30% (catalogue-wide, 15%), with amber at 39% (27%) and cedar at 41% (27%).
Musk is the exception: 43% of all pyramids carry it, yet only 26% of the myrrh ones do, so a perfume listing myrrh leans on smoke and resin more than on soft skin notes.
- Frankincense / incense41%14%
- Oud / agarwood30%15%
- Cedar / cedarwood41%27%
- Amber39%27%
- Bergamot41%33%
- Patchouli37%30%
Resin, resinoid, absolute: the words on the list
Plainly, mostly. The bare word “Myrrh” accounts for 40 of the 46 entries we counted. The other 5 name a material form, and those are the only ones that even point to what went into the bottle:
- Myrrh Resoid ×2
- Myrrh Resin LMR ×1
- Myrrh Absolute ×1
- Ethiopian Myrrh extract ×1
- Myrrh Essence ×1
Even those are the house’s words, not a lab result. Plain “myrrh” names the smell the perfumer wanted; which material delivered it, the list does not say.
Old medicine, tested on a bench
The 2025 paper notes that ancient civilisations across Africa and Eurasia used myrrh for fever, wounds, pain, joint inflammation and skin conditions, among other things. Some of that has been taken into a laboratory. In 2000, a group in Florence separated eight sesquiterpene fractions from the resin and found that a mixture of two of them stopped the growth of four common microbes, including Staphylococcus aureus and Candida albicans, and acted as a local anaesthetic on nerve membranes. The same group had published a short letter in Nature in 1996 under the title “Analgesic effects of myrrh”.
These are results on isolated fractions, in dishes and in animals. They say nothing about what a perfume does, and they are not health advice.
Dolara et al., Planta Medica (2000), from its abstract; Dolara et al., Nature (1996), title only; Kavallieratos et al., Plants (2025).
A base note is a long-term relationship
Myrrh sits in the base, so whether you like a perfume that lists it is decided late in the wear, not on the blotter. The only way to know is to wear the bottle and notice whether you reach for it again.
Sentia is where that noticing goes: mark the days you wear it, and the log answers the question the blotter never could.
Questions
Still wondering
- What is myrrh?
- Myrrh is the dried resin of Commiphora myrrha, a spiny shrub of the dry country of Somalia, Kenya and the Arabian Peninsula. Chemists call the raw material an oleo-gum-resin because it is three things at once: a gum that dissolves in water, a resin that dissolves in alcohol, and a small volatile fraction, the essential oil, which is what you smell.
- Is myrrh the same as frankincense?
- No. They are different resins from different trees: frankincense comes from Boswellia, myrrh from Commiphora. They have been burned together as incense since antiquity, which is why they are so often named in one breath, but they come from different plants.
- Is myrrh a base note?
- Usually. Of the 46 house pyramids in Sentia's catalogue that name myrrh, 33 list it in the base, 11 in the heart and 2 at the top. The base is the last tier of a perfume to show on skin.
- What does myrrh smell like in perfume?
- Balsamic, dry and resinous with a spicy edge, in the words of one industry database. In house pyramids it keeps company with incense, oud, amber and cedar far more often than chance would predict, so a perfume that lists myrrh usually sits on the smoky, resinous side of the shelf.
- Does a perfume that lists myrrh contain real myrrh?
- A notes list cannot tell you. It names a smell the perfumer was after. Only 6 of the 46 myrrh entries we counted name a material form such as an absolute, an extract or a resinoid, and even those are the house's wording, not a test.