Musky

What it is

Once taken from deer, now entirely synthetic and has been for decades. Modern musks are a family of large molecules that behave less like a smell and more like a volume control on everything else in the bottle.

What it smells like

Soft, warm and skin-like, more the impression of clean skin than a scent of its own. A sizeable minority of people cannot smell some musk molecules at all, so a fragrance built on them genuinely smells different, and weaker, to those people.

How strongly it is worn

The average strength this accord is listed at, where 100 means it dominates the fragrance.

64 / 100

What builds it

How much more often than the catalogue average. 1.0x would be chance, so these are the things that genuinely travel with it rather than the things that are simply common.

Accords it sits beside

Same measure, with its own family filtered out. Saying woody turns up with oud is a restatement, not a finding.

When it is worn

Against the average fragrance here. The line marks that average, so a bar past it means this is worn in that season or setting more than most.

Houses that use it most

Counted across the fragrances here, which reflects what we cover as much as what a house makes.

Rasasi (31), Calvin Klein (25), Al Haramain (24), Lattafa (24), Mancera (24), Armaf (21).