The ‘musk’ in your perfume almost pushed an entire deer species to extinction

The expensive musk smell in perfumery comes from the musk pod of the male musk deer, a scent gland in a hair-covered sac on the abdomen, near the genitals. Most often, musk deer were hunted or killed for these glands.

‘So desirable that we hunted the deer nearly to extinction for it. You know that warm, skin-like thing that makes your perfume stay on for hours? This is why,’ says Vinniit Aroraa, an Indian perfumer and founder of RAD LVNG, who explains that when raw, musk smells sharp, fatty and almost urinous, but when diluted in alcohol and aged, it becomes perfumery’s favourite fixative.

Musk deer have been protected since 1979, so almost everything labelled ‘musk’ in perfumes today is synthetic. Aroraa says perfumers have spent centuries chasing the worst smells on earth because, diluted and blended just right, they turn into the very thing that makes people smell unforgettable.

Nearly all fragrance ingredients are synthetic today, since strict laws protect the animals involved. Chemists have spent decades reverse-engineering scents like natural musk in a lab, molecule by molecule, and those synthetic versions are sitting in almost every bottle on the shelf.

Image: Wikimedia Commons/by MuslimDon