Crystalised ambrette musk is used in many perfume recipes, synthetic ambrette musk comes from ambrette flowers, which are found in India and subtropical Asia. This plant shares a similar fragrance with real musk and can, therefore, be used to create a substitute. Synthetic white musk can comes from natural or artificial origin depending ingredients used to make it. For example it can be made with different flowers. By deduction we can say white musk is synthetic. An artificial perfume is made by humans with chemical products. If we have to summarize, one could say that « it’s a fake perfume ». But nowadays this time is from the past and species are protected. You can find for example in China farms allowed to extract the gland without killing the animal.

A synthetic fragrance is a natural fragrance that humans know how copying it. Clearly, this is made by someone following a transformation of a product that can be natural or artificial. For example: by reacting oxygen with hydrogen (2H2 + O2 = 2H2O), we obtain the same water than the river water…A natural synthetic water. In 1888, Mr Baur discovered accidentally an artificial musk while making researches, but this one was toxic.

Synthetic white musk is a recent addition to perfume making, indeed the first synthetic musk also known as white musk, musk tahara or musk abyad in the perfume industry was discovered in 1926. Another example: The fruit aroma. Let’s have a look to the vanillin: it is a molecule in pods of vanilla but that humans synthesize from cloves, wood lignin or beet pulp. So we obtain again a natural synthetic product. I know that this fragrance is viewed as that result of crossing two other Montale scents, but I see it as an exercise in abstraction. A sharp, whistling musk, like the one in Thierry Mugler's Cologne is the perfect match to a woody quality that makes for a sort of leather scent-mirage. The wood seems like patchouli plus oud, inflected with something in the mace/nutmeg/cardamom range.

It was sometimes necessary to kill the animal to take this gland. In the 20th century, around 50000 animals were killed each years just for the musk. Around the 1970’s, species became rare and price of musk increased a lot till being more expensive than gold. Some of you maybe think that synthetic means chemical and artificial. Yet this conception of synthetic term is wrong, and let me explain why: Musk has been discovered a thousand years ago when we learnt that chevrotain also known as mouse deer developed a particular scent during their rut. Some researches have been done and a gland housed inside the animal’s abdomen was found.