Birds do it, bees do it…all kinds of living creatures do it. We’re talking about sexual attraction, and smell is often an essential element of that process! As humans, we’ve always been interested in the why and how of the mating dance, and over time we’ve even added animal ingredients to our perfumes. Perhaps we’re hoping to get back to nature by sniffing out the fierce fun that’s part of physical desire.

So, what are these wild and weird ingredients? The most famous is musk, which for many centuries was obtained from the male Siberian Musk deer. However, since the deer need to be killed in order to remove the precious musk grains from the little sacs on their lower belly, chemists began developing artificial musk in the late 1800s. Nowadays, perfumers are able to work with a selection of these faux musks. Depending on the version they choose, you might smell musk and be reminded of warm skin, or leather, or aged wood. An added bonus: musk aroma-chemicals can extend the length of a perfume, letting you enjoy it longer.

Until chemistry provided synthetic options, two other animal-derived materials were popular in perfumery. Beavers and civets both emit oily substances from glands in their backsides in order to mark their mating territory; beavers’ secretion is called castoreum, and civets’ is simply called civet. Both natural excretions are pungent, but work a strange magic when perfumers use them in tiny amounts, enhancing other perfume notes and making the fragrance last longer. Both of these have also largely been replaced by lab-created synthetics.

Another animal-derived ingredient, still prized by adventurous perfumers, is ambergris, one of the most expensive ingredients in the perfumer’s palette and rarely used in natural form in modern perfumery. This stuff comes to us from the ocean: when a sperm whale eats squid, the whale’s stomach creates a substance to cushion the squids’ sharp, indigestible beaks. In a small portion of sperm whales, this mass can get unusually large but is eventually excreted by the whale. This is where alchemy happens: Sun and salty ocean water chemically transform dross into “floating gold.”

By the time it reaches shore, this prized perfumery substance could be the size of a pebble or 280 pounds, the largest piece of ambergris ever found. In its dried state, it can be transformed into a tincture for perfumery. Depending on the ever-variable lump of ambergris, it could smell marine-like salty, woody, vanillic, animalic or all of the above, its uniquely versatile aroma adding a unique warmth and depth to perfume compositions. Because sperm whales release it naturally, ambergris is one of the only animalic ingredients considered ethical to use. Neither sperm whales nor their habitat is disturbed when ambergris is gathered on the shore.

If you’re curious about present-day perfumes with a feral side, ERIS Parfums is a must-try independent brand. Working with perfumer Antoine Lie, ERIS founder Barbara Herman sought to bring animalics back into perfumery in a modern way. In the first collection from 2016, “La Belle et la Bête” (Beauty and the Beast), Belle de Jour, Night Flower and Ma Bête each reveal a contrast between the conventional beauty of florals with the disquieting eros of animalics. Ma Bête (My Beast) is even a tribute to the hero of Jean Cocteau’s classic film La Belle et La Bête from 1946 — a furry prince in elegant, gold-trimmed garb! When actress Greta Garbo saw the film at its premiere and thought he died at the end of the film, she is said to have jumped up and cried out, “Give me back my Beast!” — hence the perfume’s name. ERIS’s fragrance Mx., an homage to the ongoing gender revolution, gets its “animalic purr” from a castoreum note, and Mxxx. comes on even stronger with a lush “overdose” of 7% authentic ambergris, not to mention some smoky-musky hyraceum (from the hyrax rodent).

Ready for a walk on the (olfactory) wild side? Let us take you there!