Saturday Seasonal: All Hallows’ Eve — What Mummies Actually Smell Like (and a Woody, Spicy, Sweet Blend)

Tonight the porch lights come on early and the doorbell keeps ringing. Somewhere between the paper skeletons and the candy bowl, there’s an older Halloween character with a surprisingly lovely scent: the mummy.

The Recipe Herodotus Wrote Down

About 2,400 years ago the Greek historian Herodotus visited Egypt and described how the embalmers worked. For the finest method, he wrote, they filled the body “with the purest bruised myrrh, with cassia, and every other sort of spicery except frankincense.” Frankincense was the temple scent, burned for the gods, and it was left out. A cheaper method used “oil of cedar” instead. So the first recipe for a mummy reads a lot like a spice-cabinet blend: resin, warm bark and wood.

What Mummies Actually Smell Like

In 2025 a team from University College London and the University of Ljubljana finally checked. Working with the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, they sampled the air around nine mummified bodies and had a trained panel describe it. The most common words were not “musty” or “spooky.” They were woody, spicy and sweet, followed by “incense-like.” Three thousand years later, the resins and woods are still doing what they were chosen to do. (The study was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, and the team is now recreating the scents for museum visitors.)

An All Hallows’ Eve Blend: 4 : 3 : 2 : 1

Put 4 drops Amyris, 3 drops Sweet Orange, 2 drops Myrrh and 1 drop Clove Bud into your Nebulizing Diffuser®. That’s the panel’s three words in order. Amyris is the wood: soft and faintly honeyed, a gentle stand-in for that oil of cedar. Sweet Orange is the sweetness, and the candlelit glow of the jack-o’-lantern. Myrrh is the incense, bittersweet and a little smoky. The single drop of Clove Bud carries the spice, so keep it to one. In honor of Herodotus, there’s no frankincense. Myrrh is a thick resin oil, so our care team’s rule applies: never run it on its own, and give the glass a quick rinse after a resin evening. Blended like this, Bernoulli’s Principle carries it out as a fine, dry mist with no heat and no water. For more on how myrrh differs from its temple cousin, see our myrrh vs frankincense guide.

In the US, tonight is also the last night of daylight saving time, so once the last trick-or-treater has gone, you get an extra hour back. Spend a little of it by the window with something woody, spicy and sweet.
Warmly,
Chad