Animal matter in perfume
- amber is a concretion found in the sperm's intestines and expelled. It is found in the open sea or beached. Very precious, we used to put them in perfumes. Too expensive today, synthetic amber is used.
We still find some in the extract of N ° 5 from Chanel.
- Musk is a secretion produced by a gland located under the skin of the abdomen of the Portemusc buckshot (which lives in the Himalayas in Tibet). He was very present once in perfumery. There are some left in The blue Hour for example, because Guerlain is the last house to still own stocks of real musk. Today, synthetic musk is used, the trade of the true is forbidden.
- The civet is a secretion from the anal gland of the civet cat that lives in Ethiopia. This material has a very strong faecal odor, but mixed with other materials, the smell evolves differently. There was some in the N ° 5 original.
To collect it, it is necessary to kill the animal, and the lobbies ecologists and protection of the animals seeing it of a very bad eye, the perfumers stopped putting in the perfumes.
- Castoreum is the secretion of two beaver glands. To collect them, you have to kill the beaver (but as the species breeds in Canada, doing a lot of damage is less of a problem). In Arpège from Lanvin there is castoreum.
