Holiday shipping update, Vintage Rose review, and musk link

It’s very busy but I’m keeping up fairly well and turn-around is about 2 days right now. The USPS suggests Monday as the last day for shipping via Priority Mail to arrive before the 25th, but Saturday is safer. All the orders that have been placed so far should safely arrive before Christmas, but as the week goes on it cuts things closer. If you are concerned about timing a package for Christmas you can send me an email to inquire before ordering.

There was a very nice review of Vintage Rose yesterday on I Smell Therefore I Am. Thanks Abby!

And there’s an interesting series about musks starting today (Tuesday) on the PerfumShrine blog. Older perfumes had animalic notes from animal sources, such as deer musk, civet, and beaver castoreum. Most modern perfumes do not use these animal ingredients because of animal cruelty awareness (we don’t use them here at Sonoma Scent Studio). The modern synthetic musks tend to smell much more clean than the old natural animalics, so perfumers of today add animalic notes by using synthetic civet and castoreum as well as ingredients like para cresyls (narcissus type notes with barnyard animalic nuances) and indoles (fecal smells found in jasmine and other florals). Naturals that can add musky notes include labdanum, angelica root, ambrette seed, and ambergris. The older nitromusks are not used much anymore because they did not biodegrade in the environment but the newer macrocyclic musks are supposed to biodegrade much better. Synthetic musks contain various amounts of powdery, sweet, floral, woodsy, animalic, and clean aspects. Different musks will work better in each composition so perfumers choose them to fit the scent and often use several in hopes of getting around anosmia issues (if someone can’t smell one they may smell others in the fragrance). The musk series on Perfumshrine will continue and will be interesting to follow.