gfunk,
It's not
so much that the mix will "go bad", as it would be more appropriate to say that it would just "go stinky".
Real animal musks have been used for centuries in fragrances both for their own scents, and for their ability
(as fixatives) to enhance and amplify other scent notes within the composition.
There are now MANY synthetic
musks included in fragrances, and they serve essentially the same purpose. (Different synthetic musks have
"preferences" as to which notes they'll enhance most while leaving other notes essentialy unchanged.)
When
composing a fragrance with musk components, whether real or synthetic, the composer needs to allow the freshly mixed
musk and other scent notes to sit and steep for a time until the synergy that occurs between the musk(s) and other
notes has reached an equilibrium, a point at which the fragrance has become stable.
JVKohl mentioned in
this post that scented
men's SOE contains something like 87 different musk components.
Think of those musk components as though they
were hungry little molecules, waiting to pounce on any new scent that is introduced to the mix. Little amplifiers
waiting to be plugged in.
If the newly introduced scent note happens to be a stinky one, like the A-None in NPA,
they don't really care. They'll enhance and amplify the stinkiest of notes, such as NPA's A-None, as happily as
they would something sweet and pleasant like Rose or Gardenia.
My experience was that after mixing at 5:1
(SOE to NPA) the mix smelled pretty good right away. A day later the NPA scent was more pronounced. A few days
further on even MORE pronounced. After two weeks the mix smelled as though I had mixed SOE and NPA in equal
proportions, and whatever little was left of the original scent of the SOE fell sorrowfully short of being able to
mask the A-None scent of the NPA which seemed to have come to dominate the entire composition.
Without
starting off too far in another direction, one might even say that A-None itself, as a "synthetic human musk" might
in itself be acting as a fixative on the other synthetic musk components in the mix.
Enough already!
Short
answer: When mixing SOE and NPA - mix small, use soon.
btw: The "7:3" ratio for SOE/NPA is even more
ridiculous than most of the other 7:3 mixes. In any 7:3 mix where the "3" is NPA, the "7" had BETTER be an undiluted
Essential Oil, or you're NOT going to adequately cover the scent of NPA. Think about it. 7:3 is just a hair more
than 2:1.
The "legendary" 7:3 NPA mixes were likely concocted by someone who was NOT able to consciously detect
the smell of A-None, and are probably responsible for as much wasting of pheromones (AND scoring opportunities!) as
all the other ways of OD'ing on pheromones.
Oscar
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