Goat Hair

Note Profile

Animal 6 perfumes

Drag to turn On Note Island

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'.

Scent Profile

Goat Hair smells animalic above everything else, cheesy, raw and lived-in rather than refined. An earthy, barnyard-soil note runs close behind it. A sour, tangy edge carries the goat-cheese character, the same short, sharp tang cheese itself has. Depending on where the hair came from, it can lean towards a dairy fattiness or towards a warmer, musk-deer-like skin quality, with a trace of leather and a mineral edge low in the background.

ScentWheel

Breadthmedium

EnvelopeBase · ~36h lasting

Family Amber · Musk · Leather

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

WorldSee it in Note Island

ScentArt

What is ScentArt?

Materials That Can Make This Note

Perfumers can build Goat Hair from materials such as:

4-ethyloctanoic acid fatty · dairy · nutty

Smell words come from published sources.

A given perfume with this note may use this material, or something else.

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.