Himalayan Deer Musk

Note Profile

Animal 1 perfume

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About

Deer musk from the Himalayan musk deer, Moschus leucogaster. The raw grains are not the soft musk of modern perfumery. Undiluted they are ammoniacal and hard to stand near, and a perfumer who works with pure essences calls the first impact not particularly nice. Three grains of one gram scent a litre of alcohol. At that dilution it turns sweet, warm and close to skin, and it is very hard to wash out of anything.

Scent Profile

Himalayan Deer Musk smells overpowering and ammoniacal in its raw grains, an animal note that one perfumer calls not particularly nice up close. Diluted right down, it turns into a soft, clean musk, warm and close to skin, and very hard to wash out. A sweet note comes from the closed musk pod, different from the smell of the opened grain. At wearing strength it settles into a soft, worn-in powdery finish.

ScentWheel

Breadthbroad

EnvelopeBase · ~42h lasting

Family Amber · Musk · Leather

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

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Materials That Can Make This Note

Perfumers can build Himalayan Deer Musk from materials such as:

Natural extract Deer musk (musk pod, natural musk grains)
3-methylcyclopentadecan-1-one musk · animal · powdery

Smell words come from published sources.

A given perfume with this note may use some of these, or something else.

Origin

From a single gland under the belly of the male Himalayan musk deer, which produces small pellets of a black substance. The animal ranges through Bhutan, India, Nepal and a small part of China, above 2,500 m, in alpine meadow, shrubland and sparse fir forest. It is a distinct species from Moschus chrysogaster, told apart mainly by the throat: chrysogaster has clear white stripes or a patch, and in leucogaster the marking is vague if it is there at all. The gland attracts females in the mating season and the deer also marks its territory by dropping pellets of musk. The material is CITES-restricted and is not legally available today as a raw material in most markets, so almost every modern use of the name is a reconstruction.

Usage in Perfumery

A base note and a fixative, used at trace concentration. The material is strong enough that a perfumer's advice for judging it is to smell the outside of the closed container, because it passes through the walls. It carries and holds everything above it, and it puts a warm, bodily undertone under florals and woods. Anything sold under this name now is either an old stock tincture or, far more often, a reconstruction built from synthetic musks.