Cat / Animals / Kitten / Photography, a photo by ►CubaGallery on Flickr.

Ahh, in places like LA and Tel Aviv, rain has a romantic air about it… Connotation of mystery, beauty and even its scent is something to look forward to. Needless to say, in rain-soaked cities like Vancouver, Portland and Seattle – it’s the sun we’re after, and the most sunful, even if dreadfully dry, is most desirable and gets those dreamy looks of mention from its inhabitants. Tell a Vancouverite that you’re going away to a desert island, and they’ll get all envious and dreamy-eyed. Tell someone in Tel Aviv or Los Angeles that the weather forecast is “chances of rain” and you can immediately start seeing them planning which sweater to wear, what hot beverage they’ll be sharing with their imaginary date, and of course – a perfume to go with it.

Green at first, a shy musk deer is hiding among tall grasses, digging its nose deep in the ground, as if in search for truffles. Earthy-green notes are the first to show through the blades of cut-grass muskiness: Egyptian geranium, with it’s baby-powder muskiness and looming above all is rooty-green angelica with its sharpness tempering its otherwise candy-sweet. Ambrette seed accentuates the wine-like qualities of geranium and brings out the musky qualities even more. Frankincense adds more depth and bright mystery, deepening its desert-like dusty and musty-urine aspects. The entire ensemble sings in an alchemical unison that hardly reveals its components to the untrained nose, and creates a rather striking illusion of castrated Tonquin musk – it’s disturbing sharp greenness and dusty fecal notes included, but not the cruelty involved in procuring it.

It’s hard to speak of this Musc Botanique as having top, heart or base notes. It behaves more like a single musk note or “accord” and each of the individual notes I’ll list below are just part of the whole, but not enough to describe it.

Notes: Angelica Roots, Egyptian geranium, Frankincense, Ambrette Seeds