Modern Living: On the Scent

To its admirers it is a warm, natural, incredibly sensual fragrance. To its detractors, it is warm and natural all right—but about as sensual as dirty sweatsocks. One thing is certain. Musk oil is the most popular new fragrance in the country.

It is, in a word, strong. "The scent will stay with you maybe four days," promises—or threatens—Bernard Mitchell, president of Chicago's Jovan, Inc., one of the biggest manufacturers. "It doesn't wash off when you swim or bathe." Its lasting quality has long made it a fixative for other perfumes, but till now its strong odor ruled it out as a separate scent.

When New York's Caswell-Massey Co. began selling the oil and other essences for do-it-yourself perfumery, it discovered that many women preferred the musk by itself. "I have to admit we were taken completely by surprise," confesses the firm's president, Ralph Taylor. He and other manufacturers set to bottling the stuff, and sales of the fragrance, which retails at about $5 per half-ounce, are now estimated at $1,000,000 per month. Reports Jovan's Mitchell: "J.C. Penney, Bergdorf Goodman's—they all want musk oil."

Part of the reason may be that younger women are tired of delicate floral scents. Part may also be musk oil's reputation as an aphrodisiac, which dates back several thousand years. Before the Chinese sealed the border between Tibet and Nepal, oil from the scent gland of the Tibetan musk deer was selling for as much as $600 per kilogram in India. The new perfumes, however, are made from chemicals.

Mitchell is naturally exultant. "For years it's been the same old thing—lilac, rose, jasmine. But now we have something totally new. I think it's going to start a whole new era of animal fragrances." Next on his list: essence of civet, and then ambergris, a secretion of whales.