Goat Hair

Note Profile

Animal

About

Goat hair is a tincture of hair shorn from a rutting billy goat, made and named by the natural perfumer Anya McCoy in 2006. It is one material with two smells depending on where the hair came from. Head hair, next to the scent glands, gives the goat-cheese reading. Haunch hair gives something McCoy says 'smells more like true musk deer musk'. Both readings are animalic first and by a long way, which is why the vector is dominated by one facet.

Scent Profile

Animalic dominates and nothing comes close to it. Every source leads with it: cheesy, lived-in, raw, primal, musky. Earthy is next, from Nottier's 'raw, earthy aroma', and it is the barnyard-soil side rather than the damp-humus side. Sour carries the goat-cheese reading that both McCoy and Mimya name, which is short-chain fatty acid chemistry, the same acids cheese gets its tang from. Below those, a lactonic dairy fattiness under the cheese, a warm clean_musk skin quality where the haunch tincture reads as deer musk, a little leather, and Nottier's 'subtly mineralic' textural edge. Small honeyed and warm_spice traces sit at the back of the worn effect rather than the raw tincture.

ScentWheel

Breadthmedium

EnvelopeBase · ~36h lasting

Family Amber · Musk · Leather

Read off the wheel, not a label applied to the note.

Origin

An animal tincture from natural perfumery, not a commercial trade material. McCoy: 'The adorable goat, Frontrunner, donated some of the hair from the area where his scent glands are located, which is the top of his head.' The hair is steeped in organic alcohol, and 'tinctured in organic alcohol, the reminiscent-of-goat-cheese scent quickly gave up its muskiness'. She also tinctured haunch hair from two other billy goats. Mimya records that commercial perfumery does not use the real thing: the profile 'is often reconstructed using synthetic bases like Costus replacements'.

Usage in Perfumery

A fixative and a blender used at trace level, and the gap between the raw smell and the worn effect is the point. McCoy on the tincture in the bottle: 'this stuff really stinks'. McCoy on the same tincture in a finished perfume: 'imperceptible to the nose, but more of a hit than ever', and the words her wearers used were 'warm, sexy, pheromonic'. 21 Fragrantica placements, nothing on Parfumo, which fits a note that natural perfumers list and commercial houses do not.