What does musk really smell like?

(And why am I showing a picture of Daisy the Donkey?)

The short answer is that real musk - which I sniffed at the Osmotheque perfume archive in Versailles - smells like the donkeys at the beach.

If you're not northern British you might not have a clue what I'm talking about, but the moment I sniffed the hairy musk pod, that's where it took me. Back to the beach and childhood holidays. A friendly donkey that hadn't had a wash in a while and had been out in the sun for a couple of weeks.

(In the UK, at seaside resorts built by the Victorians for the workers to enjoy a day of fresh air, there were "amusements" arranged too. Donkeys for children to ride on were one of them. You get a short walk along the sand with a bunch of other children and donkeys and it's the most exciting thing you can imagine when you're four years old.)

Back to the smell. Donkeys. This was a relief. Did you ever hear the lateral thinking question about the man who goes into a restaurant, orders albatross, takes a bite then goes out and shoots himself? It was a bit like the opposite of that. I realised that the Moroccan "musk" I'd been given by friends was a mixture of vanillin and synthetic musk which hadn't been illegally and cruelly obtained by killing a musk deer for its scent glands. Phew. I'd always worried about that.

Animal musk isn't used in modern perfumery. It's quite rightly banned. What we call musk can be several different materials, or a blend - always smooth and unobtrusive - the molecules that are so big that they are off some people's smelling scale - and sensual too. There's a handful of synthetic odorants which their manufacturers call musk. They have this smooth sensuallity on common, but they really smell nothing at all like donkeys.

Some of them are powders, some granules, and some are thick liquids. They're all really useful in perfumery to blend and smooth out the edges on other materials - things with more character and sharpness - and like perfumery Post-it® Notes, they fix things gently in place. So a lemon scent with musk to hold it in place will last longer than lemon by itself, but it will smell different.

In mine, I tend to use the more traditional musks to give 4160Tuesdays perfumes a vintage feel to them. I use synthetics with elegant names like Galoxolide  Fixolide and Ethylene Brassilate, and I'll often blend them with natural labdanum for its animalic side, (although that comes from a plant). I don't use a lot.

When I'm running workshops, I'll often use a musk to help rescue a perfume that smells too disparate, when someone has picked all their favourite smells and bunged them together in a beaker. It's like putting bread around a sandwich or rice with a curry.

People fell in love with the smell of musk when the huge household cleaning product companies started putting these synthetic scents in washing powder, then in conditoners too. Proud 50s housewives were taught to delight in the smell of clean laundry, so musks made their way into fine fragrance. They were a symbol of fresh cleanliness. Ironic, no?

Then came White Musk perfume from the Body Shop.

The people who now run Lush created this product for Anita Roddick in 198. At the time they didn't have their own perfumery; they were still buying in from an independent perfume manufacturer, Quintessence in the UK, the way most cosmetics companies and perfume brands do. Recently Mark and Simon Constantine, father and son perfumers at Lush, recreated the scent for a soap of their own, partly as a statement, because they were so horrified that the Body Shop sold to L'Oreal, a company they had previously campaigned against because oftheir widespread animal testing on ingredients.

As you probably know, White Musk became massively popular; many people adore it as a favourite fragrance from their teenage years. For that reason, its scent has been duplicated by hundreds of companies. It's not hard to duplicate a scent if you've got your own analytical equipment in your lab. All the big perfume companies do it as a matter of course, with every competitive scent that comes out.I t's much more difficult to do it using only your own nose.

(By the way, I don't have this machinery; it's currently beyond my finances and anyway, I'm never really interested in what other people use to make their perfumes. I prefer to  use my nose and imagination when I want to make the scent of a beach, or a garden or a city.)

White Musk it's a blend of several different materials - not just musks - and when hobby perfumers want to buy the smell they can get this blend ready made up in dipropylene glycol. Professional perfumers might use all of these materials individually, but they are unlikely to buy it ready mixed in DPG. All the same, smiliar scents wafts in abundance out of mass market and niche fragrances all over the place.

If you want to get hold of a white musk to put in blends for friends, you can buy it relatively cheaply from many materials suppiers, including Mistral. I used a generic musk blend myself when I was first starting to experiment and only selling to my mates. That was before I learned all the things I needed to comply with - about EU regulations, IFRA, PIFs and safety certificates, and before my synthetic materials workshops with Karen Gilbert and Perfumers' World, and before I could afford to buy by the kilo.

A couple of times I've had reviews of my perfumes where bloggers have written that that I'd put white musk in a 4160Tuesdays perfume, and it happened again last week, so I thought I'd explain here. He or she wrote that he or she knew I'd done it because he or she could smell it, and other people could smell it too, so it must be true.

Nerd that I am, I answered and said I hadn't put musk in it, but that if that's what their brains told them, then the musk note must be coming from something else in the blend. I even listed the entire materials list, but no, he or she was having none of it. White musk he or she could smell, so by a process of non-logic, it must be in there.

And not for the first time I realised that when someone "knows" something, that person doesn't take kindly to the suggestion that he or she might not be... right.

Those of you who have read Jean Claude Elena's superb books on perfumery will know that what we smell often bears no relation at all to what perfumers put in their blends. Misunderstandings can come from the real perfume manufacturer not telling the creative director what's actually in there. Their job is to supply the creative director with the perfume he or she wants for the brand, not to list the ingredients. But there will be a list of notes which are created by those ingredients.

Say a creative director instructs his perfume house to make an apple musk fragrance. It comes back smelling of apples and musk. The creative director then briefs the PR agency and before you know it, you've got people assuming that an apple note comes from putting squashed up apples in the perfume. And because very few people really know what genuine musk smells like - although they know what Body Shop White Musk smells like - they guess that it's got musk in too. It's not an unreasonable assumption but it's wrong. Second guessing actual ingredients is nigh on impossible. And to most customers. it's not that important. To professionaly perfumers, it's almost totally irrelevant.

And so to Daisy the donkey and Mavis the musk deer. Modern perfumes no longer smell as animalic as they did. The big materials makers created a whole different meaning for musk, then they did their best to synthesise something identical but came up with the censored version.

What do musks smell like now? It's difficult to say - sweet, fresh, vague - like a recently washed pet rabbit, I'd say.

I use them more for their effect than their smell. I don't want to make a perfume that smells of musk; I want to use it to make my perfume more wearable. But In future if someone tells me that I've put musk in a perfume when I know I haven't, I'll try not to be such a nerd; I'll try to nod and say, "That's interesting".

Materials we use: violets

α-ionone and β-ionone - Victorian treasures discovered by the early olfactory explorers

Have you ever smelled a violet? You have to get down really close. Or you can pick it, but that would be a shame. The picture here is of violets in my front garden last year. Any day they'll be back. I can't wait. There was a time when violets were cut and brought to London every morning by train for flower girls to sell by the bunch. Out of season the rich and fashionable would wear the perfume instead.

These days violet perfumes aren't made with violets. You might get a tiny amount of expensive violet leaf absolute in there, but even that doesn't smell of violets, it smells like very intense grass. Extreme leafiness.

In Victorian time and before, violet perfumes were made at huge cost, extracting the scent by a method that is no longer used - too expensive, too slow, tot small a yield. And it involved lard...

Napoleon Bonaparte loved his violet perfumes, but maybe that was because he was such an immense show off. Once he made himself emperor it turned his head; he installed himself in the palace of Versailles and spent money like water - completely forgetting why he'd joined in the French Revolution in the first place. But that's another issue. He liked his amazingly expenseive violet perfumes, and he liked everyone to know he could afford them so he splashed them about a bit.

He must have turned in his grave when Perkin, the British chemist working just up the road from here in Greenford, and others in France and Germany synthesised the ionones: alpha and beta. They smelled of violets; the world of perfumery changed overnight. (It took a bit longer than that, but not much.) Almost everyone could suddenly afford to smell of violets.

Parma Violets, the breath freshening sweets, are made with the ionones. Alpha is more floral and beta is more woody. Together they are amazing. It took until 1972 to find out that it really was the ionones that make violets smell that way, not a chemical coincidence. By that time they'd been making us smell lovely for 100 years.

Violet perfumes went out in the 70s and 80s - although the ionones were still in there, secretly adding their magic. They're back in favour now, but you'll probably find a tiny to medium amount of the ionones in almost every woman's scent on the market. Even if you can't detect the violet, they bring a delightful loveliness to a perfume. I can't describe it any better.

There's a fair amount of ionone alpha in Urura's Tokyo Cafe, and I've just put a load of ionone beta into my Vintage Tuesdays London 1969. Blended with citrus fruits and lavender, it's just amazing. Not violetty - just extra fruity and floral. It's one of the best ways I know to make natural materials smell ever more natural.

Every time I get out the ionone alpha in a sniffing session people smile and yell out "It smells of Parma Violets!" To which I reply, "Not exactly: Parma Violets smell of ionone alpha."

The perfumery materials I use, and why I use them

AKA Hydroxyphenyl butanone, frambinone 

What's the point of being a perfumer if you can't make things smell the way you want, creating scents which remind you of the things you love? That's why I started anyway. Then I got distracted by making things that smell of other people's favourites, but that's a story you can read elsewhere.

 One hot summer, our family spent a holiday afternoon in a Scottish wood where we found the biggest wild raspberry patch in the universe - probably - and ate the delicious pink fruits one by one until we had to go home. My favourite food, free. Only a stream of liquid chocolate would have improved that afternoon. 

 So to the scent of raspberries. If you buy a fragrance oil from cosmetics suppliers, it won't have come from raspberries. In my early years I used a bottle of that stuff for dabbling and experiments, but long before I started to make perfume to sell, I really needed to know exactly what I was using in my formulas. It's not just for the regulations (although that's important too) but more of an intellectual pursuit, the satisfaction that I'd got to the bottom of the issue, identified what was really going on, and in. I put on my metaphorical Sherlock deerstalker and set off on the trail of raspberry scent.

I'm going to write about raspberry leaf absolute later, by the way. That's a natural material that smells of raspberry jam. Gorgeous, expensive and difficult to work with, so very rarely found in commercial perfumes.

Perfumer, illustrator, writer and wondergeek Pia Long, told me that she thinks of raspberry ketone as the scent of the dried berries. For me it's the smell you get when you snap open a bar of Divine's dark chocolate with raspberry crunchy bits.

You can buy natural raspberry ketone, extracted from raspberries, but it costs a blooming fortune, so I buy the synthetic stuff. If you are a dedicated natural perfumer and insist on using (as close as you can get to) 100% natural materials, it's there for you. But to be honest, by the time it reaches a usable form, you can't really claim that it's natural. Some like to call these things "derived from nature" but what isn't? It's a powder, refined from the original fruits using chemistry techniques.

For me, only using natural perfumery materials is cutting off your nose to spite your face and you really need your nose in this business. More of this later.

So I often use raspberry ketone side by side with raspberry leaf absolute so get the deep jammy note and the lighter dry one; they hold hands and support each other. And I get to smell like summer pudding.

You can smell my simple raspberry accord in Urura's Tokyo Cafe, created with both materials, not to the point where the finished scent smells overwhelmingly fruity, but it has this deliciously tasty, jammy background to the gentle flowers, flightly citrus fruits and dark balsams.

 I use it in The Great Randello too, with its strawberry equivalent.

The things I use to make scents: number 3

Rose oxide, also known as Tetrahydro-4-methyl-2-(2-methylprop-1-enyl)-pyran, is one of the natural chemicals* that make roses smell the way they do.

Somes roses have no scent and are bred merely for visual beauty. That seems a shame to me. The ones bred for scent are picked by the million and turned into rose absolute - which is expensive - and rose essential oil - which is even more expensive.

Natural rose oil and absolute are made up of hundreds of different molecules.  Some smell and some don't. Some do other things, like giving you a feeling of calm and peace Rose oxide is one with a very distinctive scent.

The rose oxide I use is synthetic. It's the same molecule with the same smell as the one that comes from rose petals, but it's made in a factory, and it exists on its own. And it really does smell like metal roses would, if you could grow them. You just have to use your imagination.

Each variety of rose contains different amounts of the molecules that make it smell, including geraniol, linalool, citronellol and natural adlehydes.

So in modern commercial perfumery, where scents are made by the 100s of litres, natural rose can be too unpredictable. Batches of rose absolute from different countries, fields, levels of sunshine or rainfall, or years, will all smell slightly different from each other. It's the task of a skilled perfumer to reformulate final fragrances so they smell identical to the previous batches. This all takes far too long for many of the high street brands. The top dogs like Chanel and Guerlain do go to the trouble. Others can't afford it.

That's one good reason why perfumers will choose synthetic materials and recreate the smell of roses from its individual parts. Once they have a formula they can use it forever (regulations permitting) and it will always smell the same.

Rose oxide has a shiny brightness to it. Add a little to a boring flower blend and it will wake up; it brings some life to the olfactory party.

I use it in a light airy rose blend of my own. I also use it in an accord I call Shiny Bicyles. Inspired by the 2012 Tour de France, I developed a scent called Time to Draw the Raffle Numbers, to celebrate the moment Bradley Wiggins (Sir Wiggo) led the peloton into the Champs Elysees to help Cav win the final sprint. I used rose oxide and an essential oil that I think smells like wax polish to give me the scent of racing bikes. 

*Natural chemicals:

Roses are made of chemicals, as are human beings, everything we eat, drink and use. Some chemicals are synthetic - made in factories - and some are natural - found in nature. They are still chemicals, and as a science geek and proud of it, I'm not going to pretend otherwise. More on this later...

perfumery materials and why I use them

I do love making scents, and I like to explain what I do and why I do it. So I decided to share. Here's why I put grapefruit into almost everything I make.

 I love eating grapefruits, no sugar, just cut in half. I've developed a method to scoop out the flesh with a slightly pointed teaspoon so nothing gets left behind. I can't bear it when people think they are helping by slicing one up with a knife then handing it to me. Heathens.

 Jean-Claude Ellena, that precious being sent to earth to teach us the delights of perfumery, he says that all grapefruit oil smells like oranges in perfume, so he uses a synthetic blend instead. Perhaps it's just because I know it's in there, but when I use it, I smell grapefruits, and when other people ask me what's in my scents, they can smell grapefruit too.

I use both pink and white grapefruit essential oils: pink tends to be a little less sharp and that's my favourite. Most of it comes from California these days, a by-product of the juice industry. Which is nice. I hate waste.

 As a material, grapefruit oil is fleeting, light and lovely - what traditional and natural perfumers call a top note - a little molecule which will give you a quick hit as it escapes from the bottle, then fade into nothingless. If you want a long lasting grapefruit scent, you do what Jean Claude says and you use synthetics, bigger molecules with similar smells but with longevity.

To make the natural scent hang around a little longer, you add your fixatives then let your finished blend macerate for a few weeks, so the molecules that make grapefruit smell the way it does, attach themselves to the bigger, sticker materials - like vanilla and patchouli. It still floats off first, but less sharply.

Grapefruit oil is restricted in the world of self-regulated perfume so I keep an eye on the levels I use. I've never had to reduce the amount I need for the effect I want just to complay with the regs, so it's not been an issue. (Some people ignore the regulations, particularly those perfumers who mistakenly hold that nothing natural can harm you - to which I say nettles, belladonna and poison ivy - but the regs have been introduced to prevent sore skin so ignoring them is disingenuous at least and potentially dangerous.)

As well as smelling lovely, what else?

It's stimulating, uplifting and reviving  so it's used as an anti-depressant. Just smelling it cheers me up, don't know about you. People use it to treat SAD, depression caused by lack of sunshine. It's squeezed or distilled from the peel, so perhaps the hours and days worth of sunshine in each drop really do reach us as the benefits of the light it absorbed to come into being.

It's supposed to be good for stimulating the body to get rid of cellulite, and for athletes and dancers to remove lactic acid from their tired muscles. It calms stress. 

Can things be calming and stimulating at the same time? Yes. Like a good yoga class, a decent sniff of grapefruit and the other citrus oils wake you up but don't tip you over the edge. It's all about balance.

And that's the reason I use grapefruit, the real thing. It might not last through my scents' whole smell cycle, but a quick sniff puts me in the right mood for whatever the day is set to throw at me. It's in Urura's Tokyo Cafe and The Lion Cupboard, just for starters.