From the late 1850s to the first years of WWI, the British, French, and American élites were seemingly obsessed with one scent – freshly mown hay – as identified by the molecule responsible for its characteristic fragrance: coumarin. In fragrance adverts, society pages, poems, and novels, the cultural omnipresence of mass-produced New-Mown-Hay fragrances is visible through a considerable rise in production of hay-scented perfumes and cosmetics across the West, but especially in France, between 1850 and 1930. From face powders and sachets to handkerchief extracts, New-Mown-Hay-scented products owe their success to the availability of two raw materials: the Tonka bean and synthetic coumarin. Originating from the forests of the Guyana Shield, the Tonka tree (Dipteryx odorata) grows in Venezuela, Suriname, Guyana, and parts of Brazil. First used in Indigenous and Creole communities for medicinal and aromatic purposes, the Tonka bean becomes a valuable commodity of transatlantic trade between France, England, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, and their colonies during the first half of the 19th century. It shares a common fate with more frequently studied colonial botanical commodities, such as cinchona, rubber, coffee, tobacco, or cane sugar. The success story of Tonka in 19th-century Western culture is a curious case of olfactory cultural history. The omnipresent use of Tonka in the fragrance industry for decades may not be solely due to its objective qualities as a raw material but rather to its cultural and commercial appeal as a fixture of France’s economic, political, and cultural imperialism over southern American territories. Using qualitative methods and drawing from historical, ethnobotanical, industrial, and literary sources, I hereby demonstrate how European colonial history and culture have turned a specific scent into a commodity, rather than the odorous object itself. Through a materialist consideration of olfactory history, this article examines cultural representations of the scent of new-mown hay through the aromatic raw materials used for its production to describe the processes through which a smell itself can be the subject of sensory commodification.