Amber is one of those scents that doesn't mean quite what you'd think.
The real thing, the fossilized tree resin people wear as jewelry, has almost no scent, just a warm, honey-colored stone. Rub it or burn it, and it gives off a sharp, piney smell, close to a campfire cracking open a fresh log. People have used that trick for two thousand years to prove a piece is real.
So here's where it stops making sense. Light an "amber" candle, and there isn't a trace of pine anywhere. It's warm. It's sweet. It smells like something just pulled out of an oven.
That's because getting a scent out of real amber is nearly impossible. Perfumers have tried burning it, soaking it, pressing it, and it barely gives anything up. The one method that works, burning it down under heavy heat, produces an oil so rare and expensive that almost nobody uses it, and even that smells smoky and tar-like, nothing close to the warm, sweet scent people picture when they hear the word "amber."
So the whole category got invented instead. Not an imitation of the fossil's smell, since nobody could ever get enough of that to work with. A completely different scent, built to match the fossil's reputation, warm, golden, expensive-looking, and just borrowed its name.
The stand-in is two other resins entirely. One comes from rockrose, a scrubby shrub that grows wild across the Mediterranean, its leaves coated in a sticky resin bees can't resist. Rubbed, it smells warm and leathery, almost like a broken-in jacket and is called labdanum. The other comes from the styrax tree, cut into to let the sap bleed out and harden into something close to vanilla, thick and sweet enough to eat, that one is called benzoin.
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