A White Paper on Musk: A Scent That Began as a Bomb

The history of musk begins in a laboratory for explosives.

In 1888, a German chemist named Albert Baur set out to make a compound more powerful than TNT. He failed. What he produced instead was a white crystal that refused to explode. The crystal, however, gave off a scent — soft, warm, oddly reminiscent of the musk deer. A bomb had become a perfume. Synthetic musk had begun.

Before this, the musk in perfume came from the gland of the musk deer. To produce a single kilogram required more than thirty animals. By the gram, it cost more than gold. Baur's accident broke the chain. Over the next century, synthetic musk would evolve through four generations.

The first generation, the nitro musks (1888 to the nineteen-eighties), was strong and cheap. It occupied the base of nearly every twentieth-century perfume. Then it began to turn up where it was not invited — in river fish, in human breast milk. By the two-thousands, the European Union had banned most of them.

The second generation, the polycyclic musks (nineteen-fifties to the present), took over. Galaxolide, Tonalide, and their relatives. Most of what we now call "white musk" is, in fact, this. They too accumulate in the environment. Their use is being narrowed by regulation.

The third generation, the macrocyclic musks, attempted to resemble nature itself. In 1926, the chemist Leopold Ružička synthesized the large-ring structure of the musk deer's own molecule — work that later earned him a Nobel Prize. The molecules were expensive, and for decades they sat in the background. They returned in the nineteen-nineties, when environmental rules tightened. Today they dominate the base notes of premium fragrance.

The fourth generation, the alicyclic musks (two-thousands onward), attempts to hold three things at once: scent, stability, biodegradability. It is the most active area of research at the fragrance houses.

The history of musk compresses a contradiction at the heart of the perfume industry. Synthesis was invented to spare the musk deer. The synthesis polluted the environment, and so the next generation had to be invented. A molecule that began as a failed bomb has, over a hundred years, evolved in the direction of nature.

The white musk we wear today carries all of it.