Musk Xylol is a classic nitro-musk with a sweet, powdery, slightly animalic character. It has a soft, warm, faintly sugary muskiness with a subtle balsamic-woody undertone, less clean than modern polycyclic musks and more nostalgic/vintage in feel.AI · claude-opus-4-7
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Perfume and Flavor Chemicals, page 985.
Pale yellowish crystals or fine crystalline powder.
Insoluble in water, slightly soluble in alcohol, soluble in most perfume oils, but very poorly soluble in terpenes and other hydrocarbons, in propylene glycol and glycerin.
Sweet-musky and tenacious odor, rather harsh in its initial approach. This musk imparts sweetness but lacks the softness, floral or animal tonalities and overall power of the other Nitromusks.
Musk Xylol is sensitive to daylight, but it can be used in soap perfumes at normal concentrations (about 3 to 6% in the perfume composition). It does not replace Musk Ketone or Musk Ambrette weight for weight, but at least twice the amount of Musk Xylol is required to achieve a similar effect. The price of Musk Xylol is less than one-third of the Musk Ambrette or Ketone prices. It is used very widely in all types of low-cost and ordinary fragrances for household products, for industrial purposes, inexpensive cosmetic products, etc. and it is very often accompanied by Amylsalicylate and Coumarin, Lavandin oil or Citrus oils, or it is the main fixative in a Pine fragrance, etc.
Musk Xylol cannot be used in flavors in the USA.
Produced from Xylol with iso-Butylene (or iso-Butylchloride) via tertiary-Butylxylene and by nitration to the title material. The process is considered relatively hazardous, and many explosions have occurred in the manufacture of this chemical, so closely related to TNT (Trinitro toluene, an explosive).