Musks of Monday: Frederic Malle Musc Ravageur – a cuddly cozy musk that woos with its sweetness. Easy to love and to wear. Guerlain Musc Outreblanc – musc but make it crisp and clean. Kiehl’s Original Musk – clean florals on top of a little bit of skank. It’s the coolest musk because it’s so under-the-radar.
I also recently had the opportunity of trying the Marlou perfumes, all of which are animalic musk scents and they are really going there. They all smell slightly of sweaty bodies in their own way, so if you’re interested in that type of a scent, I would say try these.
My favourite one is Poudrextase, because it is a powdery, rosy, sweaty scent, very much like a woman who is sweating but you can smell her L’Oreal powder too. I actually really like it, but it does remind me of the Kiehl’s musk, which I already have, and I don’t think that I would wear it if I had it. None of these perfumes are safe blind-buys, and actually, I think that they are so potent that the little samples would last you a long time. I can’t imagine that anyone would want a lot of sillage when wearing these, but people also like to wear Musks Kublai Khan by Serge Lutens and I don’t know how many sprays you would put of that perfume. I have yet to smell something like that out in the wild, and where I live, people are either wearing something that smells like BR 540 or they are wearing nothing at all.
Still, I appreciate that Marlou is making the kind of perfume that they want to make, and that their scents are really going in a different direction. I hope that it inspires more perfume makers to do that. Someone also told me that she layers Ambilux with another perfume to make it animalic, the way that the vintage version used to be, and I think that is a genius idea. If you want the civet and castoreum from older versions of scents but you don’t want to go down the vintage rabbit hole, then these are a good alternative.
