7/12/20

Monsieur Musk (Dana)



There are a few different bottle types for this fragrance, and mine is identical to the one pictured above. I believe this is an interim formula, released between the vintage opaque black glass of the nineties, and the newest silver/black label in clear glass that Dana currently advertises on their site. It's probably four or five years old.

Many people say the musk is a minor player here, but Monsieur Musk is all musk to my nose. It conjures the image of Tom Cruise in Risky Business with Ray-Ban shades and a lit Marlboro. Released by Houbigant in 1973, it was eventually acquired by Parfums Parquet, and wound up with Dana, the humblest of humble outfits, with no masculine beauties to their name - except this one. Somehow they've abstained from messing it up, and I'm happy to say it smells like a Vietnam-era musk bomb. It possesses a kind of suburban bordello raunch, replete with the animalic and floral underpinnings found in pre-Clinton era fougeres. Imagine if you could scissor off the musks of Paco Rabanne PH and bottle them, and that's MM. The experience is a dirty/clean/soapy redolence, pitching freshness against skank, and it smells dated, but very good.

I'm not so sure why, but I get a slight eighties vibe from this scent, hence the Risky Business reference. Its fake citrus note and Castile accent evokes the Whatchamacallit candy bar commercial, permed curls, boxy Thunderbirds, dad building shelves in the garage next to the Caprice with a pack of Newports tucked in his shirt. It was a simpler time back then, though one could say that this type of simple and old-school musk scent was passé by 1985. Still, it's incredibly cheap, very well made, and worth a bottle if you enjoy unembellished 20th century drugstore musks.