It’s always rather funny when you hear people say something like, “I want a scent that ______ but doesn’t have musk. I hate musk.”
You can’t possibly hate musk that much if you want a perfume. See, asking for a fragrance with no musk is like asking for a cheeseburger with no cheese. This cheeseless cheeseburger was requested by yours truly once much to the chagrin of the teenager behind the counter. Almost every fragrance, be it a perfume or a laundry detergent contains some sort of musk. Usually synthetic. I say ‘usually’ like 99% of the time is a smaller fraction of the instance.
Natural musks, back in the day when making a fragrance involved chasing down an animal, were used as fixatives. They still are but 99% of all musks are now synthetics. Mainly because chasing an animal down to extract its secretions to put into perfume isn’t as socially or ethically acceptable as it once was (was it ever?).
These days, you have musks of every color that mimic almost any scent and are used as fixatives for everything that could hold a smell. What I find most funny are the people who say they hate musk who use scented soap. Some of the strongest musks are contained in scented soap because it’s such a harsh environment for fragrances.
The truth is, people don’t necessarily hate ‘musk’ they just hate things that smell ‘musky’ which could be the smell of warm, dense, saltiness that really turns them away from a fragrance. But then, ‘musky’ could mean so many different things to many different people. So it’s not a matter of ‘I hate musk’ at all.