Can someone explain musk fragrances properly?

[Elsya]

Hey all, I’ve been circling around this topic for a while without really diving into it properly, and now I genuinely need some insight from people who know their stuff. I got into musk fragrance around six months ago after buying Narciso Rodriguez For Her (yeah, the obvious starter one lol). A friend told me “if you like that, you should really explore musks deeper”, so I started reading about them, ordering samples here and there, testing stuff on skin, all that. What’s confusing me is how broad the whole musk category actually is. It doesn’t feel like one thing at all. You’ve got the super clean white musks that smell like fresh laundry or clean skin, then the more animalic musks that can feel almost weird at first, and then woody musks that just sit on the skin forever. Sometimes I honestly struggle to tell where one style ends and another begins. The thing that really made me question it was trying Kiehl’s Musk a few weeks ago. On me it smelled really soft, almost barely there. But my boyfriend kept noticing something warmer and deeper coming off my skin hours later. So now I’m wondering if musk fragrances react more strongly to skin chemistry than other fragrance families do. Also, do you guys have any musk fragrances that actually last properly? Like 8+ hours without disappearing completely? And are natural musks genuinely that different from synthetic musks when it comes to projection and longevity? I keep reading completely opposite opinions about it.