Myrrhe Mystère

A resin as subject

Tom Ford put Myrrhe Mystère on sale in September 2023 and gave the leading role to a resin. The fragrance announces neither a place nor a season but a raw material, and its name promises in advance what the formula will have to sustain.

The house offers a reading of it that it wants to be personal, dense and luminous at once. The Eau de Parfum comes in three sizes: 30 and 50 ml, plus a large 250 ml bottle that has more to do with the object than with use.

Two extractions of the same balsam

The claimed singularity lies in the doubling of the material. Rather than choosing between a myrrh essence and a resinoid, Tom Ford puts both into the formula and makes them the central argument of the fragrance.

An essence and a resinoid do not render the same odor of the resin: the former keeps its volatile, bitter facet, the latter its heavy, sweet one. Combining them amounts to spreading the resin across the entire duration.

The Orpur label

The official description does not merely name the raw materials, it names their qualities: Orpur myrrh resinoid, Orpur Australian sandalwood album, Orpur jasmine absolute. The detail is not decorative.

Orpur is the label that Givaudan has reserved since 2000 for its finest natural qualities; the name means pure gold. Reading it on a Tom Ford list situates the origin of the materials, in the absence of the perfumer's name.

No perfumer is credited by the brand. The critic Persolaise notes that an attribution is circulating, without endorsing it himself, and nothing on the house's part comes to confirm it.

Six fragrances in the same year

Persolaise counts six Tom Ford releases for 2023 alone and sees in this one a return to low volume, far from the loud releases of the period. He reads into it the temptation of discreet luxury, a term not usually associated with the brand.

The name, for its part, commits to a great deal. Naming a fragrance after a single ingredient and promising it mystery fixes in advance the ground on which it will be judged. That is exactly where the critics have been waiting for it.