The Mystery of Musk-Craving

The Mystery of Musk
"Craving"

Well, here it finally is. My personal Musk offering to the Perfume World.
To celebrate the 8th anniversary of the Natural Perfumers Guild, they are running a competition amongst us renegade Natural Perfumers to see what we can come up with in the way of Natural Musk Perfumes.
(see my post on the Mystery of Musk Competition) .
The whole undertaking has excited and terrified me all the way through in equal measure...the whole concept of creating a perfume under a very short time limit, to be submitted to a panel of people who spend their lives reviewing perfumes from the most famous perfume houses in the world...

Why am I doing this to myself?
How could I possibly think I could do this?

I have been through so many different versions, cried, torn my hair out, obsessed over little bottles with smelly sticky substances and finally ended up with one large bottle of deep chestnut coloured glass clear liquid sitting on my workbench.
It sits there glinting in the late afternoon sun like some kind of mysterious alchemical liqour....which I suppose it is really....

It's a Gourmand Perfume...a perfume that combines all the things I love and crave.....Cuddles, Sex....and Food.

It's got all the animalistic base notes you'd hope to find in a decent musk perfume, with middle notes of warm roasted hazelnuts, sweet caramel and dark sultry cocoa liquor.
OK, so I'm a food head. I can remember someone asking me years ago wether I prefer Sex or Food...and I honestly couldn't say!
My idea of a perfect afternoon involves lot's of sexy nakedness...pheromones and wild passion....with intervals of chocolate cake, roasted nuts and more......
Hey, why not make it perfect and combine them both?!

So that's EXACTLY what I've done with my perfume!

There is however even olfactory method to my madness:
Cocoa absolute to my nose is one of the sexiest base notes in perfumery..it has a deep bittersweet magic to it that hits you right in the groin....roasted nuts too give off one of those smells that give you that warm, safe at home in the kitchen kind of feeling...and caramel, while sweet, has a smokey honey depth to it that is very very sexy....

So what are the other ingredients you're probably wondering at this stage?

Well, right at the very base, you have the King of natural musk ingredients: Hyraceum. this wonderful stuff has an incredible lions den kinda musky funk that is SO King of the Wild! And on top of that, it's one of the very few enviromentally friendly cruelty free animal musks you can get! On it's own it just hits you in the face like...well, just like a well slept and mated in lions den I guess....but in "Craving", there's just enough to give you that sense of "Gee, I'm an animal at heart" at the very base of the scent to make it "Real".
With it, you find 2 kinds of Vetiver, Queen of the herbal root aphrodisiacs. Sexy, Smokey, sultry and deep.....
Costly Oud, worth more in weight than Gold, traded by the Arabian Empires for hundreds of years and still famous throughout the world for it's mysterious and sophisticated magic.
Ambrette Seed, gentle and subtle, and undeniably the clostest thing to the chemical counterparts you nowadays find in musk perfumes...It's one of my favourite ingredients, buttery soft with a deep sandalwood touch that develops only once applied to the skin....
Australian Sandalwood, grown in sustainable plantations in my favourite country, deep woody and buttery smooth with just enough bite to give it a bit of a kick...
There's more of course, but these are the dominant musk notes in the Potion.

It's turned out to be an interesting perfume. No top notes as such, no floral notes, or fruits, no fancy ozones or clever chypres or other fancy things.....instead a deep, sultry brew of warmth and yumminess....
You start off with the mouthwatering scent of the roasted nuts, warmed with honey and caramel, and then it goes deeper and the Vetiver and bitter Chocolate rise to embrace you.....and as the scent warms to your skin, the animal musk that is so close to your own begins to spread over you.....

It's one of the sexiest scents I've ever made. Yet at the same time it's almost subtle, clinging close to your skin, a private scent, shared only with those who snuggle close enough to become entranced by it.....
I put on a jacket yesterday, that I had been wearing 3 days ago while I was working on the perfume...and was immediately enveloped in the scent again....

It's been a long journey to here. 21 (yes, twenty one! I counted!) different musk versions, until I finally almost had it...but there was an acrid bynote to it I just couldn't get rid of no matter what I added to soften it down. And it was only a week ago that I finally worked out what the problem was! Which meant making up a whole new batch minus the offending substance! (It was actually one of the more expensive Oud extracts believe it or not!)

Will others like it too?
that remains to be seen...at the moment 30 little bottles are winging their way accross the ocean into the waiting arms of 18 perfume critics and 12 other proffesional perfumers.

And if I think about this too much I'll start biting my nails all over again....