One of the big dogs of the perfume world is also a powerhouse of
confusion. What the hell is musk? Do you know? Are you sure?
First, let’s disambiguate the basics. Musky and Musty are
not the same thing. Musky is kind of like an animal smell – warm, sexy,
intoxicating. Musty is related to moldy, it’s the smell of a dark hamper. Wet
and dark, that’s musty. Thing is, body odor can be both musky AND musty, and
this is one of the places where the two get intertwined. We can go on and on
with this, because there’s this thing I call ‘river musk,’ which is absolutely
intoxicating, to me at least, and is the by-product of stuff that lives in the
river. Oceans have it too, but it tends to be mixed with dead fish. It’s a
secondary metabolite, a kind of seaweed pheromone, which means it’s very
similar to animal musk in that it’s a pheromone/chemosignal, but from plants.
And yet, it’s related to wet things.
Parenthetically, body odor is actually not musty, for the
most part. Usually it’s your dirty clothes that are musty, because they’ve been
sitting in a pile on the floor, dark because they’re balled up, and damp
because you just took them off, and your body is warm, and the air around you
is less warm, so the water vapor in the air condenses on the clothes…either
that or you were sweating just before you took them off. Either way, it’s your
clothes that smell musty. That being said, we should also note that your
armpits can get musty for the same reasons (it’s pretty dark in there). That
isn’t what we call body odor, however.
Okay, so we got that out of the way. Sort of. Now for the
anosmia part. Anosmia means you can’t smell something. Half the population is
anosmic to something, and there are more people anosmic to musk than most other
smells. Musk is a really big molecule, one of the biggest we can smell, and for
some reason, bigger molecules tend to be invisible to us, but not in the way
other anosmias work. It seems to go in-and-out.
Take the behemoth of the synthetic musks, Iso-E Super,
which is so super that a perfume was made with only this as its only ingredient
(and for non fragrance enthusiasts, that is totally unheard of). Lots of people
can’t smell it. Saskia Wilson-Brown of the Institute
for Art and Olfaction gave me a sample. I couldn’t smell it. Then I could.
Then I couldn’t again. Anyway, because musk has this problem, or because we
have this problem with musk, perfumers tend to use lots of musks in their
formulas, to make sure that people will be able to smell at least one of the
musks in there.
Next problem – the laundry detergent industry. Musks have
this attribute where they do really well in fabrics and with detergents. They
hold on for a long time (because they’re so big, as a molecule, among other
reasons). They’re all over the world of laundry detergents; just about every
laundry detergent smells like musk. But you probably don’t know that. You think
that smell is the ‘smell of fresh laundry,’ not that of musk. When I tell
people this, they don’t believe me, probably because they would rather not
associate the smell of sweaty animal bodies with their freshly-laundered
sheets. But alas, there it is: the smell of dirty is now the smell of clean.
What’s worse is that these sheets eventually end up in a
dark hamper, and smell musty as well as musky. And so now you’re totally
screwed.
discosting
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