Invisible Dominance
High in the rhododendron thickets of the Himalayas lives a species of miniature deer, Moschus moschiferus. Silent and solitary, this diminutive mammal - weighing less than 25 pounds and standing only 20 inches high at the shoulder - is seen only at dawn and dusk, feeding on tender shoots of dandelion and honeysuckle. Unlike other deer, it is not armed with antlers; in every regard, it is the most subtle, retiring and innocuous of creatures. But in one sense - smell - its invisible presence dominates not just its native forests, but the entire world.

Moschus is the musk deer. Musk, musky, dusky... Like the smell it describes, the word dredges up some provocative images. An overwhelming Jovan encounter on an elevator, with some disco-king stud showing three open buttons of dark-haired chest and a couple of gold chains; an afternoon with a frizzy-haired hippie girl in a van parked outside a Dead show; or maybe just the peculiar adolescent confusion you experienced at an eighth-grade dance, when your best friend doused himself with aftershave.

But put aside these prejudices for a moment, and take a look at the reality of musk. Not limited to strong perfumes of questionable taste, musk is in fact the basic ingredient of practically all perfumes, from the most expensive and refined French florals to the sleaziest reek of high school hoochies. Everything in your medicine cabinet contains musk: soaps, shampoos, powders, cosmetics, bath oils, even your toothpaste. It is an ingredient in household cleansers, laundry detergents, insect repellents, and almost every other commercial product that requires fragrance - including food. Does the label say "artificially flavored?" Musk is added to fruit flavors, vanilla, chocolates, licorice, hard candy, chewing gum...

"I don't know what you're chewin, but my gum smells like peppermint!" Good point: with the exception of so-called "single-note" musk perfumes, none of the above products smell discernibly of musk. But here we touch upon the wondrous mystery, and the secret which makes musk the Empress of Olfaction.

A Little Bit of History
The word "musk" can be traced along the same caravan routes as the substance to which it refers. From the Sanskrit "mushkas" (originally meaning testicle), to Persian "musk," to Latin "muscus," the mysterious scent has been traded westward for millennia. Ancient writings indicate that musk was an important commodity in China as long ago as 3500 BC, and found its way to the Mediterranean by Classical times.

Musk's impact on Islamic culture is particularly significant: Mohammed regarded it above all other scents, and Muslim legend maintains that the Garden of Paradise is inhabited by beautiful maidens who are the living embodiment of musk. The scent's mystical properties were so highly valued in Persia that musk was mixed into the mortared walls of mosques at Tabriz and Kara Amed, giving the temples a permanent breath of paradise.

In Europe, on the other hand, attitudes toward musk have varied considerably over the past 500 years. In periods of popular acceptance, the scent was hailed as a superior perfume; a fragrance-enhancer; an aphrodisiac; a tonic for the heart; a cure for "melancholy" and "vapors of the womb;" and a general safeguard against weakness and disease. It perfumed not only bodies (both women's and men's), but fashion accessories and leather goods, particularly gloves and book bindings. Musk was commonly mixed into medicines and candies, and was sometimes even eaten outright, one "grain" at a time.

At other times, a victim of ever-changing manners and scientific opinion, the fragrance was discredited as unclean, immoral, habit-forming, and even poisonous. Doctors accused musk of causing stomach problems in men, and nervous disorders (from swooning fits to hysteria and insanity) in women. Casanova almost fainted when he inhaled the musk worn by an old countess; during his era, the scent was associated with prostitutes and homosexuals. The 17th-century socialite Madame de Sˇvignˇ warned her friends against the "addiction" of sniffing gloves perfumed with musk, perhaps because Henry VI of France was rumored to have died as a result of musk-sniffing.

(*Sniff*)
Before we grow too intoxicated on exotic fragrance, we should put the subject in its proper frame. The most prominent feature on the human face is the nose.

Smell is our most primitive sense, but not necessarily our weakest. Olfaction is the sense we share with the lowliest forms of life, and in the course of evolution it has been somewhat eclipsed by sight and hearing at the forefront of our consciousness. But thanks to the intimacy of its nature, smell possesses a very concrete advantage.

Vision depends upon the perception of reflected light; hearing, upon the perception of audible vibration. This data only "describes" the object in question, while smell involves an actual physical contact with the perceived object. You see a pile of fresh dogshit on a sunny sidewalk; you hear the flies buzzing around it; but meet this stimulus in the form of smell, and you've really been touched.

In order for you to perceive a smell, some volatile constituent of the smelly object must vaporize, then waft deep into your nose and settle on your olfactory receptors. When you consider that every smell, on a molecular level, actually touches your nerves, it makes you realize just how tightly you're woven into the fabric of the world. As the case of a warm dogshit illustrates, olfaction - like life generally - is not for the squeamish.

Our noses are surprisingly sensitive. Take skunk spray as an example: its active odorant, ethyl mercaptan, is perceptible in quantities as small as 0.000,000,000,000,071 ounce. To get an idea of the human sensitivity to pure musk, you'd have to add from one to five more zeros to the right of that decimal point (depending on which authority you consult).

That kind of olfactory sensitivity isn't likely to overlook the smell of its own armpit. Despite the disdain shown by the preppy couple on the antiperspirant commercial ("If he smells, it's over!"), the biological facts indicate that we are built to smell and be smelled.

The origin of human body odor is a source of some widespread misunderstanding ("If she sweats at the gym, that's one thing... but when we're together..."). It turns out that sweat per se is not the culprit. Eccrine glands, the tiny, body-cooling sweat glands that cover the entire skin surface, secrete a watery substance that is actually odorless - at least when fresh. But the skin of a typical Homo Sapiens is also studded with some one million apocrine glands: specialized glands whose purpose is not to cool the body, but to odorize it.

The apocrines are concentrated mainly in the armpits and around the genitals, and it's no coincidence that these areas usually sport tufts of wiry hair - hair which soaks up the thick, oily apocrine secretion and disperses it into the air from a vastly increased surface area. Unlike the eccrine sweat glands, which function from birth, the apocrines don't kick in until sexual maturity - which gives a pretty clear indication of their function. Can you say "sex scent"?

Sex scent: an aphrodisiac delivered in the form of fragrance. As Dr. George Dodd of the University of Warwick pointed out in the British New Scientist, "...if you think about the sense of smell from the viewpoint of a biochemist, it is clear that smells are a kind of drug." A fully sexualized animal body that dispenses odor according to Nature's own prescription... isn't he talking about pheromones?

Pheromones are chemical language - a form of olfactory communication between members of the same species. They are fundamental to sexual reproduction in most creatures, and in many species also serve as territorial markers, alarm signals, trail indicators, etc. Pheromones exist up and down the evolutionary ladder, from amoebas to miniature deer to magazine readers. But despite their biological importance, pheromones have only been recognized by scientists since 1959, when the word was spliced together out of the Greek roots pherein ("to bear along") and hormon, ("an excitement").

The catalogue of proven pheromonal effects is long and astonishing: pheromones emitted by a single virgin female Emperor moth attract suitors from as far away as eleven kilometers; a pheromone in the urine of the male prairie vole causes the female vole's uterus to swell to three times its normal size, and induces ovulation within two days; and, in a charming display of large-mammal affection, the domestic hog seduces a sow by blowing his pheromone-laden breath into her face. This list could go on and on.

But the pheromone question grows a little hazier when applied to ourselves. Scientists acknowledge that humans, like every other member of the brotherhood of beasts, produce and respond to pheromones; but the degree to which pheromones influence our behavior remains unclear. For humans - cerebral as we are, biased by our cultural conditioning, and oriented to the senses of sight and hearing - there is more to sexual affection than airborne chemical messages. Such popular pastimes as pornography and phone sex prove as much; they operate without addressing the nose at all.

But the fact remains that olfaction, whether pheromonal or not, still plays an important role in human sexual compatibility. Among doctors and anthropologists of the 19th and early 20th centuries, this subject was hardly a matter of dispute, and it was generally agreed that body odor was both an indication of healthful vigor and a natural attractant to the opposite sex.

Dr. Albert Hagen, Europe's most renowned "sexual osphresiologist" and author of the epic study Odoratus Sexualis, insisted that unlike other mammals - for whom anal-genital odors function as the source of compelling sexual excitement - in humans it is the apocrine secretions of the armpit that deliver the goods. Hagen maintained that dogs walk on four legs and sniff butt, while people walk on two legs and (perhaps without being consciously aware of it) sniff armpits. Common experience bears out the argument: though genital odors play an intense role in the actual act of human sex, it's far more likely that during courtship, the first smell of a potential partner will be that of armpit, rather than groin.

This "first whiff" is carried to its logical extreme in a telling custom of rural Austria, in which girls at village dances clench slices of apple in their armpits, then offer them after the dance - warm, and mysteriously fragrant - to the partner of their choice. (Though no formal study has been made of the effectiveness this ploy, the image of an apple-cheeked peasant girl serving up a sweat-soaked apple slice is deliciously obscene.)

But why endure this lengthy digression into armpits, when the subject at hand is musk? The answer lies before our very noses. Time and again, throughout both literary and scientific texts, one descriptive adjective in particular is employed to describe the smell of the human body: the word is "musky." By some ironic coincidence of mammalian biology, man and musk deer are fused at the glands. Musk, musky, dusky...

The Gland in Question
Only the mature male Moschus produces musk. The substance occurs in only one location on the deer's body: on its abdomen, just in front of its penis, is a hairy pouch known as the musk gland. This sac is about the size of a golf ball. It is composed of several layers of skin, with two openings immediately above the animal's urethra.

In the early summer, unripe liquid musk drains into the gland from the surrounding tissues, and is stored there for some weeks or months. During the course of this time, the musk - 30 grams of it or so - "matures" into a granular, waxy, reddish-brown substance with an extremely potent and familiar smell.

When the musk has ripened - shortly before the autumn rutting season - the deer begin to discharge it mixed with their urine, apparently to mark their territory and attract females. (This behavior is familiar to anyone who has come in contact with a tomcat that "sprays.") Even in winter, male musk deer have been reported to leave behind fragrant red snow, rather than yellow. But this charming natural curiosity, at the same time that it has earned the deer worldwide renown, has endangered its existence.

For thousands of years, musk has been collected by humans who trapped the deer and cut out its gland. This arrangement left the trappers with a convenient palm-sized package of dried musk, but posed an obvious problem for the deer. It is almost impossible to extract the musk without killing the deer and removing the gland; and because the quaint but mortally effective wooden traps used by Himalayan hunters knew no distinction between musk-bearing adult males and the commercially valueless females and juveniles, the slaughter was indiscriminate. By the beginning of this century, Moschus populations had been hunted to precariously low levels, and the animal had disappeared altogether in across large parts of its original Himalayan range.

In 1973 the deer's plight was recognized by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES). The CITES agreement limits trapping of the deer, and most countries (Japan and France excepted) now prohibit trade in natural musk altogether. International protection efforts aside, the deer's real salvation has come thanks to the miracles of 20th century chemistry; the truth is, virtually all the musk used in today's fragrance industry is synthetically manufactured.

It's All Fake?!?!
The primary odorous ketone in musk - "muscone" - was isolated by chemists in 1926. Since then, more than 300 musk substitutes have been created in the laboratory. Because there is no single synthetic answer to the question posed by such a complex organic compound, cosmetic chemists must blend various synthetics - each of which demonstrates a particular characteristic of the deer's natural secretion - to approximate of the real thing.

The best synthetics (the "macrocyclics") are the most expensive and difficult to manufacture, while the cheapest tend to be not only poor imitations, but possibly toxic as well. (The so-called "nitro-musks," a family of inexpensive synthetics used widely for decades, have actually been taken off the market in recent years because of their "photo-toxicity" - they become poisonous when exposed to the sun.)

Nonetheless, every quality of synthetic is cheaper and easier to obtain than the natural product. During the 1970s and 1980s, the world-wide legal "harvest" of natural musk amounted to only about 700 pounds per year, with a market value fluctuating from one-half to three times its weight in gold. Compare these figures to the popular and cheaply manufactured "polycyclic" musk Tonalid, churned out by PFW Aroma Chemicals at their plant in the Netherlands: PFW makes 1,700 tons of Tonalid a year, and 1994 prices hovered around $15.00 per pound.

But is synthetic musk an acceptable replacement for the real thing? To the eye, a selection of these synthetics could pass for the ingredients of a high-class chemistry set: white powders, yellowish crystals, or translucent chemical slush in sealed glass jars. Take off the lids, and you might encounter that familiar sexy reek, that oily warmth between fruit and animal; or you might just get a vertiginous olfactory impression of the laboratory. If your nose, expecting musk, instead encounters soap, or solvent, or dirty plastic - huh?

In one respect, these synthetic musks do mimic the effect of the natural compound eminently well: the word is "fixative."

In perfumery, a fixative is an ingredient that blends, sustains, enhances, and "exalts" the other, more volatile fragrances that constitute a perfume. Musk is distinguished by a high molecular weight that assures a slow, sustained release of fragrance. This olfactory potency is more enduring, more penetrating, and, on a literal molecular level, more profound than other scents; thus, when included as a fixative base in a blended fragrance, musk actually amplifies the intensity and duration of the fragrance as a whole. Even when musk is present in a concentration too dilute to be consciously perceived, its fixative nature is at work.

As fixatives, the synthetics are just as successful as the natural substance they imitate. Macrocyclic musks work so well that when a tiny sample is placed in a re-used laboratory jar, the forgotten scent of whatever was in the jar previously may reappear and overpower the smell of the musk itself. Want to test this out at home? Put a few drops of "musk oil" perfume in your toilet. You'll be instantly reminded of your shortcomings as a housekeeper.

This almost magical property of musk explains its success across the spectrum of fragrance chemistry. Synthetic musk in laundry detergent, in toothpaste, in candy... the fragrance chefs back at the factory have learned that by adding a pinch of the astonishing fixative, they can be certain that whatever aroma they've brewed up will stick around and get noticed. Musk is to fragrance what MSG is to Chinese food.

Musk Redux
Musk has been an indispensable fixative in the manufacture of fragrances throughout history, but its own obtrusive scent has often been downplayed with heavy dilution; perfumers preferred violets, or roses, or jasmine over an in-your-face animal scent. In this century, no such thing as a "single-note" musk perfume existed until the end of the 1960's; but once discovered, musk became something of a mania.

In response to the "back-to-nature" ethos of the hippie movement, American perfumers on both coasts sought alternatives to traditional French perfumes. Around 1970, both The Body Shop in Berkeley, CA, and Kiehl's in New York City introduced single-note "essential oil" fragrances. The concept was to allow customers to mix and personalize their own perfumes, so all kinds of scents were offered, from light florals to heavy musk. But the hippies who bought the oils found the simplicity and intense sexuality of the "musk oil" quite satisfying by itself.

(It's worth noting that the oils sold as "natural musk" at The Body Shop and Kiehl's were, properly speaking, neither unblended nor natural. All the "essential" oils on their racks were fragrance blends of some sort, though obviously not such elaborate compositions as old-style French perfumes; and the musks were strictly synthetic mixtures.)

Soon larger manufacturers took notice of musk's new popularity, and Jovan and others entered the market. Thanks to its penetrating, animal character, musk was widely promoted as a fragrance for men as well as women; and that animal character coincided perfectly with the uninhibited sexuality of the times. The 1970s were really the Musk Years: a quick look at the ads in a vintage Playboy will remind you just how thoroughly the smell of synthetic Himalayan deer glands saturated our culture.

Although musk as a primary scent declined somewhat in popularity after the passing of the Disco Era, the "essential oil" craze continues unabated. In 1987 The Body Shop was taken over by a huge English firm of the same name, and today single-note perfumes (with names like "China Musk" and "Wood Musk") are available from franchise cosmetics outlets, health-food stores, and head shops across the world. And the shelves of every drugstore in the land are still heaped with multitudes of cheap musk body products: perfumes, colognes, bath oils, aftershaves, and - most ironic of all - deodorants.

The Strange and Glorious Truth
It should be clear by now that the notion of a musk deodorant is absurd. Musk is preeminently an odorant, both an amplifier of smells and a smell in its own right - and its smell, like the one that a deodorant purports to suppress, is a chemical call to animal sex.

The fixative property of musk surely "exalts" the apocrine scent of human skin, just as it exalts the various perfumes and fragrances of which it is a base. Simply put, wearing musk makes your skin more smellable. Maybe a musk "deodorant" isn't such a bad idea after all: a sticky layer of the most effective fixative known to man, smeared across your apocrine-packed armpit, is one way to get yourself noticed...

But jokes aside, this is certainly the most interesting thing about the olfactory relationship of musk and human: when you smell musk on a person's skin, it's hard to tell where one scent ends and the other begins. What you encounter is a kind of animal/human synergy, and it's one that gets you where you live: on the raw nerves some three inches up your nose.

It would be convenient to end on this note, with the heavy sex-molecules settling in a drizzle on our olfactory receptors; but one question still remains to be addressed. Though musk historically has been worn by both genders, today women are the primary consumers of musk-heavy perfumes (and of course of perfumes in general). In the words of Dr. George Dodd: "How curious it should be that the musk is produced by the male animal and is then used by us in perfumes that are made for the human female. What does this say about the uncharted depths of human olfactory biology?"

This question is not satisfactorily addressed anywhere in the scattered literature of musk; even the great "osphresiologist" Dr. Hagen glosses over it. For a soothingly Californian answer, let's turn to Kathy Saunders, daughter of Jane Saunders, founder of the original Body Shop in Berkeley.

"A lot of that stuff is immeasurable. If you put on a fragrance and feel sexy, what do you exude?"