Musk in perfume - A guide for perfumers

0:00 musk what exactly is it no not this kind of musk the kind of musk that's used in perfumery if you've ever bought a perfume before and looked at the smelling notes of the perfume you've probably seen musk listed as one of the components in this video i'm going to explain to you what musk actually is in perfumery the origins of musk the different types of musk and finally how you can use musk to make your own perfumes the term musk was originally used to refer to the secretion of the musk deer an animal found in the himalayas now in perfumery animalic raw materials were traditionally used quite frequently however nowadays they're mostly banned and not used at all this is because mostly of ethical considerations because often it involves the capture or killing a lot of the animals used to produce these raw

0:45 materials but also they're very costly and it wouldn't be economical anyway to do it today perfume houses use synthetic replicas of those molecules found in the original animalic products and these are what are referred to as musks or synthetic musks in perfumery these musk molecules don't only naturally occur in animals however they also naturally occur in some plants for example ambretolid a commonly used musk is found in amret seed oil and exaltalide another common musk is actually found naturally in angelica roots oil now musks often aren't the easiest molecules for beginner perfumers to understand and part of the reason for this is well if you go to smell some musk as a beginner quite often you don't smell anything at all part of the reason for this is that

1:31 musk molecules are pretty much all bass notes which means they last a long time but they don't really project out they don't evaporate quickly which means most of the molecules actually stay on your skin when you've applied your perfume or stay on the scent strip as a perfumer evaluating them and that means that there's not actually that much that's diffused into the air at a given moment for you to be able to smell the other thing is that musks just have a very soft smell if you were to ask me to describe the smell of masks i would say something like soft silky smooth powdery and they're very quiet things so it's not like something like a green grassy smell or like an aquatic smell or a fruity smell something that shouts and jumps straight out of you it's almost completely the opposite it's very kind of soft and blends into the

2:18 background actually in most perfumes it forms the background it's kind of like the canvas with white primer on that you paint on top of as so to speak so it's something that's quite hard to necessarily notice unless you actually know what you're looking for what i found helpful in understanding the musks better was actually by going and looking through their history and realizing that there were different generations of musks with different similarities when doing this and looking at the structural difference between the different classes of musk molecules it really helped kind of guide my smelling and notice similarities between musks of the same category and differences between musks of different categories i would say this process helped me understand the musks better overall so i'm going to quickly give you a primer on the history of musks and the different classes of musk the story begins with the first

3:04 generation of musks which were called the nitro musks now these were widely used and also very cost effective but now they're banned in most countries except for a few like india and china these were actually discovered by accident basically what happened was in 1888 a chemist called albert bauer was looking for alternatives to tnt the explosive and accidentally came across a molecule which smelled kind of musky so this one was called musketone after that there was musk xylene which was actually prohibited by the ifra and that's because it's actually classed as an explosive so i guess you don't want to use that and have your perfumes explode and then there was also musk and brett which was banned in 1995 due to concerns

3:50 that it was neuropathic essentially that means it causes things like numbness and tingling again something you probably don't really want in your perfume now before all of this was known classic perfumes actually made heavy use of these musks for example a chanel number five and this is actually one of the reasons that chanel number five today doesn't smell the same as it used to back in the day i've never smelled any of these nitro musks first hand obviously because well there's no real reason for me to try to obtain them given all of the bad effects but what i do have is musk ketone substitute by iff so i think this is a base that's designed to replicate the smell of musketone but obviously i don't know how accurate it is so i'm going to go and smell this and to me it's interesting because it's got this kind of earthy animalic side to it

4:35 but it's also got this quite powdery maybe slightly metallic and just a little bit sweet side to it as well now allegedly the nitro masks are meant to smell uh sweet and also the most powdery out of all the classes of musks so that's what i've read anyway now we're going to move on to the second generation of musks which are the macrocyclic musks so the macrocyclic must stemmed from work in the early 1900s now essentially what happened was these animalic raw materials well scientists wanted to know what was actually in them to see if they could recreate some molecules or some of these smells so what they did is they started analyzing them and by the 1920s they discovered these things called macrocyclic musks now you may ask what

5:22 does it mean to be a macrocyclic musk well okay essentially in chemistry you can have cyclic molecules and these are quite common they're just molecules that contain a ring in the structure of the molecule now the term macrocyclic is essentially when the ring is very big so in chemistry macrocyclic rings are much rarer than usual cyclic molecules and they only occur every now and again so macrocyclic musks essentially is a term used to describe these musky smelling molecules which have a macrocycle ring in the chemical structure that's pretty much all there is to it so what happened is chemists started discovering these macrocyclic musk molecules in the 1920s and in the 1930s they were developing processes to produce them on an industrial scale now

6:08 since then all the way up until the modern day what's happened is different competing groups of chemists have actually worked to find more and more efficient methods of synthesizing some of these macrocyclic musks and what that's done is increase the efficiency so done things like reduce waste and most importantly for the industry driven down the cost of producing them so i've got a couple of these macrocyclic musks here and let's start with exaltelide because that is the one that's naturally found in angelica root oil and the civet cat so to me this is a lot softer than the musketone substitute it has way less of that animalic kind of smell to it or that kind of woolen or fur smell that i would say and i would say it's a lot smoother it's

6:54 still definitely got a powderiness to it and overall it's just kind of sweeter and it's much more enveloping i would say it's a lot more of a kind of pleasant smell now next we've got ethylene brasolite now ethylene bracelet is basically the workhorse musk of the industry and that's because the synthetic process used to create it actually starts off with rapeseed oil so obviously rapeseed oil is quite easy to obtain which means a lot of this ethylene bracelet can be quite easily produced and if i go and smell this just because it's cheap doesn't mean it smells bad by any means in comparison to the exaltellade i would say it's even softer maybe a little bit more faint

7:40 but ethylene brassylate has quite a surprising sweetness to it i would say at least and it still has some of this silky smoothness and i would also say it has a little bit less maybe of the intensity and powderiness that comes through in some of the other muscles that i've smelled but i really love ethylene bracelet in fact i think it was probably the first musk that i learned to properly use in perfumes and that is because of the kind of soft sweetness that it provides and it's so um let's say friendly with the other raw materials it really just sits there and provides this lovely warm background to your perfume without kind of taking it in a specific direction and for example some of the musks when you put them in actually can make your perfume quite powdery which is useful in some perfume compositions but i find i

8:26 don't like that so much in for example fresher perfume compositions the ethylene brasoli i think is a must that really works in almost all contexts so just because it's cheap i wouldn't shy away from that if anything i would recommend that probably out of all the masks as kind of the best staple musk to use next then we have the third generation of musks the polycyclic musks now work began developing these polycyclic musks just after world war ii that's because scientists at the time were already noticing problems with the nitro musks mostly this was because they realized that they're actually photochemically reactive i.e when you add light they can react quite easily which obviously isn't good for a lot of applications of the musks so they started developing these new molecules called polycyclic musks and

9:12 what polycyclic means is similar to macrocyclic the cyclic part is that there's a ring in the molecule of the musk however the poly in front of it this time means that there's multiple of these rings so instead of having one really big ring like in the macrocyclic musks the polycyclic musks have multiple rings in the musk molecule now interestingly these polycyclic musks have actually been shown to activate some of the same olfactory receptors in the nose as some of the macrocyclic musks and that goes to explain why there's a continuity of smell even though the molecules look completely different the other thing about polycyclic musks is they often do a really good job of sticking to things like clothes and this is one reason that they use all the time in laundry so when you put musks in your

10:00 laundry detergent they work quite well in there as something to make it smell nice because they stick to your clothes which means when your clothes come out of the wash they still have the smell of the musk other molecules um for example a lot of top notes and other things will either be unstable with the laundry detergent or they won't last very long and they'll actually just get washed off with the water in the washing machine so that's one of the reasons that laundry smells are often synonymous with musky smells that kind of smell when you take your laundry out and you hang it up to dry and you smell your clothes that's mostly down to musks so that also gives you a little bit of an idea of what musks smell like if you don't know already some other interesting facts about the polycyclic musks are that they're actually found in very tiny amounts in human breast milk but also

10:46 they are poorly biodegradable and this is something that companies have been looking at and for that reason some companies actually choose not to use polycyclic musks in their products here with me i have two of the most common polycyclic musks so i've got galaxolide and tonalite so let's start with galaxolide now when i smell galaxolide it's very interesting because you can clearly smell the difference from the macrocyclic masks in my opinion it's much more of maybe you could say a sweet smell but i don't find it sweet in the same way that it's like a warm inviting sweetness is much more of a kind of animalic maybe

11:31 slightly synthetic or just a bit of a weird sweetness and for some reason the smell of this reminds me a little bit of sun cream i'm not too sure why um maybe it's because it was found in some sun cream that i used and the interesting thing about galaxy light is that it's also a key component of the grossman accord so the garage metacord is a very famous accord is used in perfumery and it forms the structure of a lot of perfumes if you're interested to find out more about that then actually check out the link in the description which i'll put to a video i've made covering the grocerman accord completely and how you can go and make it for yourself so next here we have tonalite or tone lid so

12:16 this one i find to be quite a bit stronger and more perceivable than galaxolide actually if you're a beginner i think this is one you probably won't have too much trouble with and to me this actually has quite an earthy tonality to it and it reminds me of kind of like wet dog fur or something like that it's definitely on the animalic side as far as musks go now another thing i found when researching this video was that in the book scent and chemistry it actually says that there's a very special accord between tonalite and cumeron so what i did was i actually took a scent strip earlier and i dipped it uh one end in tonalite at 10 solution and another end in coumarin at 10 solution in order to kind of get an idea for what this uh chord or such might smell like

13:04 so from what i can tell um it seems to work to me though that said the coumarin definitely dominates quite a bit and i think that's just because coumarin is naturally a stronger smelling or at least stronger perceived molecule so i think this is something that i'll probably have to try balancing the jean cars method would be a good method to go and balance this with um if you're interested in how you might want to go and make this a chord you could go and look up the jean cars method and that would teach you how to kind of find the right ratio of these molecules but this is certainly something that's interesting to look into and apparently this is frequently used in fuji type perfumes again i've done a video on a fujia accord so if you're interested in learning how to make the fuji record for yourself then check out that link in the description anyway i'm sure you're dying to hear

13:49 about the fourth and final class of musks and these are the linear or the technical term the acyclic musks acyclic is just the chemical term for all the molecules kind of a straight line rather than a ring so these musks are said to have a cotton or a linen effect though by looking at these musks and what's been written about them in general there's no real hard or fast rule for exactly how they smell and there seems to be quite a variety of these acyclic musks now i've picked one example here which is called aplalide and you wouldn't be surprised to find out that it actually smells just a little bit like apples so yeah when i go smell apple light it definitely has this kind of creamy softness a little bit of a sweetness just kind of like the other musks

14:35 but i would say firstly it has less of a powderiness but it has more of this very slightly earthy but not earthy in an intense way kind of like that wet fur of the tonalite and quite an aptly kind of that earthy tobacco aptly like scent which to me is the exact kind of fingerprint let's just say of the damascus so to me this haplolyde is almost kind of like halfway between a musk and a damascus which is a kind of a molecule found in rose that also has a little bit of an apple smell to it so there we go that's an acyclic musk and a lot of these are quite different so depending on which one you get you might have quite a different smell now for those of you interested in picking up a chords apparently according

15:21 to that book again sent in chemistry i'll put a link in the description to that book if you're interested in it apparently the acyclic musk helvetilite can be used in combination with the macrocyclic musk habanolide to get a really nice linen and kind of white cotton accord so if you're interested in that white musk or that linen cotton accord then maybe that would be a good place to start i haven't tried it yet and that's simply because i don't actually have any helvetilide but if i were to get some helvetilite then for sure that's something i would try okay so now you understand what the different groups of musks are i guess your next question is probably how do i actually go and use these in a perfume well firstly i'm just going to give you some tips on actually learning to smell the musks in the first place because obviously before you go and use these masks in the perfume you need to know

16:06 what they smell like on their own so you can actually understand how they're working in your perfume so i'm especially going to give some tips for beginners or people who can't actually quite smell the musks yet now firstly know that a lot of perfumers when they started out have the same problem that they can't necessarily smell the masks or at least can't smell them very easily and this is something that does improve over time so the first piece of advice i would give you is simply keep trying to smell them don't just smell them once but every week or every month or however long it takes keep smelling them again and again until eventually your nose kind of learns the pattern of the musk even if you can't smell it just keep looking for it with your nose and try to notice what is it when i smell kind of just the plain air versus when i smell the scent strip with this musk on it

16:54 secondly i would advise definitely wait for the alcohol to evaporate before smelling your musk so like i always say you should smell things in dilution and i would recommend starting at something like 10 dilution of all raw materials to begin starting to smell them now i recommend this will be no different with your musk so i assume that in order to learn your mask what you would do is you take the mask molecule dilute it down to 10 and your perfume is alcohol and then go and smell that on your scent strip but one thing to note is that when you go and do that the perfume is alcohol obviously is also there on your scent strip and the volatile kind of top note smell of alcohol is very strong and completely overpowers the musk smell so you really need to leave the um the dilution or that dilution of musk on your scent strip for

17:41 quite a while before the musk smell kind of comes through and that's simply because you're waiting for all that perfume as alcohol that you dissolved it in to evaporate so i'd recommend leaving a musk on the scent strip for something like half an hour before you actually even bother to go and try to smell it and keep going to smell it in the coming days weeks and even months to see how that smell changes over time because that's really important to convince you that it is actually a bass note and just quite how long it lasts in your perfume another thing apart from just leaving it on the scent strip is actually putting that dilution on your skin and smelling it like that i don't know why but for some reason with musks i often find them easier to smell on your skin finally the other tip i have if those methods aren't working for you is to do what i've been doing here and actually smell them in boxes so what you can do is buy these business

18:26 card holder boxes they're called and you can go and take your sense strip with your musk diluted to 10 let the alcohol evaporate off your sand strip but then after you've done that go and just put it in one of these boxes and what that does is it kind of it kind of stops too much stuff evaporating it kind of creates a little piece of air just inside the box where the air fills up with the smell of that musk what that means is when you go to open the box you get a brief kind of um breath let's say of air which is kind of filled with that scent of the musk so what that does is essentially it makes the air which you smell much more concentrated with the musk than it would be if you're just holding that sense strip because of course

19:11 all of the molecules which are kind of evaporating off of the scent strip they're then diffusing straight away into the air but if they're getting trapped inside the air of this box then this kind of builds up this musky smell in the air so i find this method really helps for these kind of molecules they're really difficult to detect and it kind of helps you when you're just beginning to learn what they actually start to smell like and then after you've done that you can start to actually notice those same smells on the scent strip without having to use the box okay so finally then how do i go and use these musks in my perfume well like i said earlier one way you could think about the masks is a bit like the primer on your canvas or just kind of like a background wash on your canvas if your perfume were to be kind of viewed in the

19:57 lens as if it were a painting so essentially these musks what they do is they create this kind of long lasting very soft kind of bed to your perfume kind of like almost the base of your structure something which to build on top of what you've got to remember is if you've gone and smelled these on your own you should notice that they're quite weak and hard to perceive what this actually means is you can use these often in higher concentrations than you would with other raw materials so what i would recommend as an experiment to start with is take just one musk of your choosing and add it at about 20 percent of your perfume formula what i mean by that is twenty percent of all of the raw materials not twenty percent of uh the solution so say you had a twenty percent strength

20:42 eau de parfum if you take twenty percent of that then that means it will be four percent dilution of such total to your musk molecule and that should be a high enough concentration for you to get a good idea of the effect it's having on the perfume so i would kind of try to use them like that as a base note start maybe with that kind of level say like 10 20 30 of your formula really depends um you can adjust this later but just to start with to get an idea of how it's affecting your formula and then kind of see it as this kind of big kind of soft fluffy thing that's kind of pulling together the rest of the perfume obviously it depends a bit on the musk that's how i would use ethylene bracelet for example but maybe something like

21:27 tonalite which is a bit stronger and more animalic than for example a mask like that you might actually use it in lower concentrations or to give a specific animalic effect to your perfume you've gone and done that some trial blends in that kind of format what i recommend doing is not only spelling those on the scent strip but also actually trying those on the skin and what you really want to look out for is that kind of four to eight hour period after applying it to your skin and try to do an experiment where you do a perfume both with and without the musks and then especially notice what happens on your skin in that kind of four to eight hour period after applying it what you should notice is the version with the musks in has this kind of soft musky smell in the background that's kind of lasting longer than most of the other notes in your perfume once you've

22:14 done that you'll really get an idea of how you're actually going to use those masks and the effect that they have on your perfumes anyway that's the end of this video about musks i really hope you enjoyed it let me know in the comments if you like this video or not and also remember to subscribe if you want to see other videos like this in the future [Music] you