Unspoken Musk
Francesca Bianchi (2022)

Reactions to Unspoken Musk, as with any musk, seems to be divided according to whether you can smell the composition in its entirety or only parts of it. The latter group finds it to be clean, inoffensive, and even a little boring (that classic white musk profile), while the former finds it urinous and therefore awful. I can smell all of Unspoken Musk and am mystified by the violent reactions. To my nose, it follows the track of The Musc (Essential Parfums), Helmut Lang EDP, and even Kiehl’s Musk in that it straddles the line between clean and unclean, so that it really could be both or either depending on the moment you turn to inspect it. For the most part, it is dominated by a clean, fluffy iris-musk accord supported by a base of warm, honeyed resins and tonka bean.

But there is a touch of hyraceum and civet, both essences squeezed from the nether regions of animals (ethically collected as a waste product in the case of hyraceum and artificially mimicked by an aromachemical in the case of civet), which together add a rather sharp and unlovely dimension to the scent. To be fair, though, these accords do not smell like urine, they just smell like the undercarriage of a beloved pet – a cat at best or a kid goat at worst. And it is the counterposing of something a little feral with the cleanliness of the main body of the scent – that cloudy, musky nothingness – that gives the scent its human sensibility, and by corollary its sensuality. I love the hide and seek nature of musks like this, the ones that are neither too clean or too foul but contain elements of both, just like real human bodies do. I have far too many examples of this in my collection to want to pick Unspoken Musk up myself, but I beg people trying this out to refrain from judging it on a cursory sniff of its top notes or even on one wear alone. It is a scent that cries out for longer acquaintance.