Tonkin Musk : Sinensis Pure Parfum 30ml

Tonkin Musk : Sinensis Pure Parfum 30ml

At a time when any genuine deer musk is a luxury to be used by a perfumer, the one kind that…

I’ve been fortunate to handle lots of musk in my career. As a result, I have my fair share of prejudice against the marketing around musk… all the white musks, blue musks, red musks… even pink musk!

Then there’s ‘black musk’.

As easy as all the fake musks are to dismiss, you can’t help but wonder if there was some distant reality that gave birth to the claims backing ‘black’ musk because in academic literature black is the only color associated to musk (referring to moschus fuscus).

It wasn’t until I opened a stash of musk that belonged to the don of fragrance collectors and perfumery’s most legendary patron, that my disbelief set in. 

Amidst the ancient Tibetan and Mongolian pods, there was a bag that was… different.

When you open that bag, the potency of the aroma that blasts out is unmatched by anything you’ve smelled before. When you hold these pods and study them up close, you’re sure they could be centuries old. It was like black tar, like a proper paste of black ink, as if the pods had been fermenting for a hundred years.

The potency, the ferocity of this musk, and its animalic beauty – a savage grandeur – is incredible. And everything that it touches, it transmutes into gold… as it did with the rare Vietnamese oud we previously infused with it.

My most lavish perfumes contained Tonkin musk: Notes From Underground, Chypre Sultan, and Private Blend. And the one thing they share is… transcendence. A shimmering debonaire quality permeates the notes as if breathing class into all of the ingredients it comes into contact with. 

To compose a perfume around Tonkin musk and name it after this legendary aromatic was a different challenge altogether.

Top : Ginger · Yuzu · Peach · Lavender

Heart : Violet · Mimosa · Japanese Rose · Roman Chamomile · Lily of the Valley · Tuberose

Base : Royal Tonkin Musk · Vietnamese Oud · Vintage Timor Sandalwood · Oakmoss · Orris

Many scent pyramids you see are pretty complete – they just don’t show the ratios. But the above are only some of the aromatics that went into composing this thickly layered fragrance and only give you a hint of what to expect – because all these ingredients are filtered through the magical prism of what I believe to be the true origin of black musk.

Imagine bitter yuzu with that musky Tonkin bite enhanced by the soulful citrus hue of Cambodian oud laced with the rich creamy floral tone of tuberose and daffodil. This fusion alone would make for a regal perfume, but in Tonkin Musk it’s only one layer to relish…

The red tone of Indian jasmine and Lily of the Valley comes out in the heart, as the baklava sweetness of tonka bean sautéed with the stirred butter aroma of vintage Timor sandalwood gets covered in iris root powder diffused through rose essence. All jacked up with the ever-present power of raw dark tar ink black Tonkin musk tincture that carries the perfume.

At a time when any genuine deer musk is a luxury to be used by a perfumer, the one kind that all the books throughout the centuries have praised as the best kind – Tonkin Musk – is one perfumers today can only dream about. Yet, here it is, loud and luscious, for you to indulge in.

As you’ll read in the reviews below, “this fragrance is an oxymoron. It somehow captures a rainbow of florals, plants, and woods while trapping them in a dark Musk prism” — that, as much as the musk, it’s the floral dimension of Tonkin Musk that hooked many who didn’t expect that a musk perfume can smell so beautiful…

This edition hones in on this floral facet to make it even more refined and elaborate (featuring new florals), with an even funkier musk core. Rather than contrast, the enhanced musk beautifies and exalts the florals in a way no other aromatic could.

And now, this edition received a massive upgrade.

In addition to the enhanced florals and musk, this is Tonkin Musk as it was always meant to be composed… with the oud that shares its birthplace pulsating through the brew.

Tonkin is not just a type of musk. It’s a place – the historical name for northern Vietnam, the region where the most prized musk deer in the world once roamed. And sinensis is Vietnam’s agarwood – the bitter, zesty, resinous profile that gave Nha Trang its fame.

Tonkin Musk now contains three grams (per 50ml) of our in-house Sinensis Quintet, composed of five benchmark sinensis distillations, including Hainan 2005, Yunnan 2003, Yunnan Royale, Guallam Kilam, and Ha Tinh LTD.

When you understand that, the pairing stops being a compositional choice and becomes something more like a reunion. The musk’s dark animalic depth and the sinensis’ orange-peel medicinal bite share a root – the same climate, the same soil, the same ancient history.

Tonkin musk is already extinct – the little we have is all there will ever be. Once we’ve used them, that’s when collectors will start talking about the EO Tonkin days. And quality sinensis oud from the same soil isn’t far behind – you already can’t find the likes of Hainan 2005 and Yunnan 2003 anywhere.

Hainan 2005, distilled from wild Chinese agarwood that is now officially extinct, possesses a pheromonal depth that collectors have spent decades chasing – ambergris, mahogany, tobacco, and orange peel converging into an oud profile that cannot be replicated today at any price. A spray of citrus zest runs through its animalic core like a nerve, giving it a spicy-sweet twang you don’t find anywhere else. Yunnan 2003 is even rarer – so prized among Chinese collectors that most distillations from Yunnan never cross the border. It opens with a broad-spectrum animalic blast – salty leather, barnyard, frankincense – that resolves over hours into osmanthus, dried orange peel, aged tobacco, and a clean musk-amber base that I’d describe as a scent that sends you herding through the Himalayan foothills, compass set for Tibet. Over twenty years of aging have turned both oils into something that will never exist again.

Yunnan Royale brings the addictive face of the same region into the composition – that lush, saccharine-red resin so densely concentrated it deepens the musk’s own animalic sweetness rather than competing with it. Where the Tonkin musk is dark and tarry, Yunnan Royale is cooling and richly rouge, and the two together produce a sweetness ancient and feral.

Guallam Kilam is what the Japanese kodo masters define as the benchmark of Vietnamese kinam – a sunlight-yellow, narcotic bitterness that, when it meets the Tonkin musk in this composition, produces the most extraordinary effect: the musk’s animalic grandeur and the kinam’s bitter medicinal clarity sharpen each other. The musk becomes more savage and the oud, more luminous. The white florals caught between them – tuberose, lily of the valley, the entire floral heart is oudified.

Ha Tinh LTD closes the quintet and completes what the other four set up. This is an incredibly rare, decade-aged Ha Tinh distillation that has been steeped directly in Tonkin musk. It’s the only infusion of its kind, ever.

In this composition, and on your skin, the Tonkin musk and the Sinensis ouds recognize each other. The ouds amplify the musk’s tenacity while their orange-peel citrus bite and animalic amber depth give the creamy white florals a zesty resinous glow they didn’t have before. The whole composition gains a coherence that only happens when incredible ingredients belong together at a fundamental level.

This means you’ll bliss out to everything that makes Tonkin Musk so “gorgeous! I loooooooooove it. The florals are out of this world”… and the knowledge that nothing like this will ever be made again.