Hyraceum Absolute 40%

Adam Michael has this to say “What we have here (21/11/21) is a famous corporate produced Hyraceum Absolute. 40% absolute. 60% DIPG. 

My initial opinion via the strip, is that I find the entire experience lacklustre, passionless and deeply unfulfilling. Instead of an all-out warm skanky animalic bonanza, you are subjected to the most boring scent profile with a few shades of sweetness. Yes, the hyraceum DNA is here but it sucks and as such, I feel this is a material that can’t be properly evaluated nor appreciated via the smelling strip.

However, applied neat onto the skin, and hence with some warmth underneath it, this aromatic comes to life, and for a time is just like handling the material in its fossilised state – so very warm, dark, masculine, castoreum, leathery and real musk orientated with ultra-trace … shoe polish, Burley tobacco, gravel, varnish and cresol tonalities.

If you have ever handled hyraceum in its fossilised state, you will know the chunks can be humongous, easily as big as a rugby ball. More times than not, each piece will be dry and brittle on the outside and usually of a pastel brown through to medium brown colour. Each piece being so hard and compacted like rock, that I use a chisel and geological hammer in order to smash each piece of hyraceum into small enough pieces for clients to utilise further for tinctures. It is a great stress reliever!

The point being is when you smash these fossilised pieces you will discover areas that are full on black in colour, sometimes of a grainy texture and other times being rather sticky (see photos). These black coloured areas of the fossilised waste are without question the most aromatically satisfying on the senses as the aroma is so alive and fresh. My long-winded point here is that this absolute in its early stages- applied on skin – represents the very best that fossilised hyraceum has to offer. In fact, applied to the skin, this is a divine absolute that one can easily fall in love with.

The corporate blurb mentions civet qualities in this aroma profile. Personally, I disagree and find the suggestion bizarre, misleading and lazy by the evaluators. Let us not beat around the bush and hide behind pc language, civet in its pure -undiluted- form, is a full-on shitty smell in its opening, varying from cheesy junk food shitty, through to all out diarrhoea shitty, resembling the aroma of busy male public bathrooms that haven’t been cleaned for a while. This absolute showcases nothing of the sort.

Regarding uses, if you want to build your own true to life deer musk accords without the animal cruelty then this absolute can be a brilliant building block, also useful for injecting more realism and intensity within leather creations, generally blends well with the usual animalic suspects through to agrestic naturals and can be called upon when trying to build oud creations, working especially well if the oud creations focal point is that of a melody of heavy woods. Overall, an extremely beautiful aromatic and I give this a very respectable Adam Michael score of 8.8 out of 10.”

We also sell hyraceum in its fossilised form here. And we also offer well aged hyraceum tincture here. Both are also of good educational value when learning about hyraceum aroma profile.

Unfortunately, this material cannot be shipped to Australia or America