Congratulations! You have found a lucrative way to maintain your luxury lifestyle well into the future! If you wish to augment your capital, the perfume industry will pay excessively for that unique beavery smell of vanilla strawberry with just a hint of fine cordovan leather. So will the tobacco industry: beaver excretion is the taste of Marlboro country! And remember the beaver the next time you enjoy your skinny vanilla latte. Your vanilla anything. Also strawberry and raspberry. As a natural additive, that little critter gets around! You’ll find endless marketing opportunities ahead.
Have your assistant procure a beaver, male. Be sure not to wake the little guy up, the beaver not your helper, though do wake your helper up because beavers are best caught at dawn. Have your assistant be very careful, beaver teeth are sharp and do take note of its claws. It can strip bark off of a tree just like that. That fast. The beaver is cute, but it gets much less cute when it’s angry, and your people have just kidnapped it.
This next part is too important to trust anybody but yourself, if you want to get the job done right. Position the beaver so you can look directly into its posterior, if you’ll forgive the term. Get up close and remind yourself this is an opportunity not a chore. The gland you want is called the castor which is Latin for beaver. It sits right behind the derriére gland, if you’ll pardon my French. Be very careful to get the right one! Givenchy and Chanel will not thank you for it. Lancôme might not mind.
Place a collection bag just under the beaver. You will need a lubricant. I suggest La Mer’s marvelously emolliative face serum, or La Prarie’s lubricating eye gel: a masterpiece in a jar. You may wish to forgo using rubber or latex gloves and let it absorb into your skin. Your assistant might want to wear gloves. Maybe the kind falconers use or something similarly sturdy? Also your assistant might need sort of face protecting sports equipment. They will know where to go and what to get.
Your beaver is sure to be feeling stressed at this point. Perhaps offer it a Xanax? And yourself with one as well because now this is the hard part. You must get right up into the beaver’s special place and feel around. Try not to think about what you are doing just be sure that your beaver is being held down properly and focus on the Christian Dior of it all.
Once you can feel the castor gland, keep your finger on it and pace your thumb on the outside of the beaver’s fanny. Now squeeze your thumb and finger together in a motion right toward the beaver’s exit area, again being very careful not to upset your beaver. This is no time to be losing your assistant to a beaver mauling. The trick is to remember this is just as unpleasant for the beaver as is it is for you so you must treat the beaver with grateful consideration. Keep in mind the beaver is a part of the earth and we must respect what we take from it, use only the parts that we want, and be thankful to nature for its bounty.
Smell that? That is castoreum, and it smells like money! Also a little bit like feces. Once it dries it will take on notes of root beer and vanilla leather. Like one of your fine Manolo Blahniks stepping on an ice cream sundae.
Finally, have your assistant return the beaver to wherever it came from, and keep in mind to tell them it must be returned precisely to its home territory, and not just the end of the driveway. The beaver uses its castoreum for scent marking which is crucial to its survival, for without its security fence of vanilla spiced locations, it will most certainly be seen by other beavers as an interloper and be vulnerable to vicious attack. Though you may be tempted for convenience sake to tell your assistant to release the beaver into your closest golf course waterway or shopping center fountain, it is critically important for the preservation of your future profit to respect the beaver’s natural boundaries. With the proper conservation and stewardship of your beaver and the continuation of vague product labeling, your lucrative relationship with your toothy little friend can and should carry on well into your future.
