Muskrat

Note Profile

Animal

About

Muskrat is a tincture of the preputial gland secretion of Ondatra zibethicus, a North American rodent. It smells of dirty musk over damp earth. Reviewers place it between white musk and the animal materials: it carries the soft skin-musk effect but arrives dirtier, saltier and more mouldy than any synthetic musk does. It has never been a commercial musk source, so it is rare in perfumery and almost all description of it comes from one natural-perfumery house.

Scent Profile

Animalic leads and nothing is close to it. The opening is sharp, salty and frankly rodent, one reviewer naming a rodent cage and another Vietnamese fish sauce. Under that sits clean_musk, the soft sweet skin muskiness the material settles into and the reason its seller calls it the nearest natural to white musk. Earthy is the third weight and is the mould, bitter roots and mushrooms that run through the whole wear, dry and damp at the same time. Mineral is the salty phase in the middle, which one reviewer said reminded him briefly of ambergris. Fruity and dry_woody are secondary and both come from comparisons: the fruitiness that overlaps castoreum but much softer, and the woodsier, leafier quality that separates muskrat from a clean synthetic musk. Tobacco_hay carries the bran and hay named in the same list as the mould. Below the named line, sulphurous and mossy_chypre hold the fish-sauce and damp-cellar edges, and small amounts of sweet_vanillic, green, aquatic_ozonic and creamy_woody hold the sweet-savoury balance the reviews describe. Leather is kept low on purpose: the same reviewer who tried both says leather is castoreum's signature, not muskrat's.

ScentWheel

Breadthbroad

EnvelopeBase · ~30h lasting

Family Amber · Musk · Leather, Woody & Earthy

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

Origin

Both sexes of the muskrat, Ondatra zibethicus, produce a musky substance from paired preputial glands in the genital area. The secretion has been known in Europe since the 17th century. A chemical extraction route was worked out in the 1940s but never paid for itself, and Wikipedia records that muskrat has never been a commercially important source of musk. What reaches perfumers today is an alcoholic tincture of the dried glands, sold in small quantities by natural perfumers rather than by the fragrance houses.

Usage in Perfumery

A base-note animalic used at trace levels as an intensifier rather than as a stated note. The one house that sells it describes it as the closest natural to synthetic white musk, which is how it gets used: to put a dirty, skin-like floor under a musk accord without the leather that castoreum brings. Nine Fragrantica entries and eight Parfumo entries name it, across seven Parfumo brands, so its appearance in finished perfumes is real but small.