The Origin of Ambergris (2012) | Hacker News Reader

The Origin of Ambergris (2012)

press.uchicago.edu

74 pointsEndXA33 comments

Fortunately for perfumery, ambergris' distinctive odor is principally owed to just two chemicals, ambroxan and ambrinol, both of which are now synthesized.

Ambrinol is really disgusting (source: I have a small sample) and only makes sense mixed with the very nice ambroxide (IIRC, ambroxan is a commercial moniker for it).

There's a curious evolution about abroxan's rep. If I'm not mistaken it was Dior that first used the name instead of ambergris in the publicity materials. I guess they were trying to avoid the "they kill the poor whales to make fucking perfumes". But they ended with the "I can't stand that synthetic ambroxan crap, I must be allergic and everybody's wearing Sauvage now".

New perfumes use some other bullshit names like "driftwood", "marine notes" or just "amber" (a very different stuff).

"Ambergris has been synthesized, but its synthetic versions are not convincing. They lack an indefinable something that is gained only after years spent at sea."

Probably a bit like synthesized truffle oil, good enough for most people but lacking richness for a trained delicate palate.

The scandal with truffle oil is how difficult it is to find anything remotely real even if you want to, because of the duplicitous wording on packaging and marketing copy.

I think the scandal with truffle is that even refined palates can't find it. Even the most refined restaurants that use actual truffle, are forced to add the fake thing, or most customers won't be satisfied with the dish.

The bloom and trail effect given by ambergris is replaced with ambroxan, however combining ambroxan and ambrinol does little to recreate a "real" ambergris odour. Those may thousands of other molecules, while perhaps only <5%, give a very distinctive and unique odour. It's like a rich leather bag that's been floating in the ocean for +30y - salty, marine, animalistic, musky and leathery all in one.

Really interesting to read. So IIUC ambergris is _sometimes_ formed in the 4th (last) sperm whale stomach, is basically a constipatory plug of indigestible squid parts (beaks, quills, and eye lenses) which either eventually passes thru the whale’s anus, ruptures the intestine and kills the whale, or is (was?) harvested on rare occasion by whalers. And if you’re lucky you can find it washed up on beaches.

It can be worth a very nice amount of money. Life changing perhaps, depending on where you live.

https://thethaiger.com/thai-life/lucky-fisherman-finds-whale...

3 million Baht buys a quite nice house or condo in Thailand.

For a moment I thought this was about Manzikert, Tonsure, Shriek and Finch...of Jeff Vandermeer's Ambergris trilogy.

one of my favourite frags 'Kouros' by YSL uses ambergris (or synthesised) shame that over time the formula has changed so much. as per descriptions..it really used to smell like "sweat"/"heavy"...and has changed to much fresher and cleaner.

It's not ambergris that gives Kouros its characteristic pissy notes, but civet (also real oakmoss and strong aldehydes) ingredients all of which they toned down in the early 2000s and then completely removed in 2008 (Loreal era).

The Kouros you can buy these days (white instead of metallic shoulders), is heavy on coriander with barely any "musk" and bears little resemblance to the "scent of the gods" of the 80s and 90s. I still have multiple bottles from the 90s which are as good as ever, together with Kouros Fraicheur from the same era which is another Pierre Bourdon masterpiece. YSL perfumes from the 80s and 90s were legendary.

thanks for the correction :) I would kill for a bottle of Fraische...is that similar/same to Kouros Sport?

It's Kouros with no aldehydes, less sage, no coriander/cinammon/leather, retaining the civet but a bit different: the pissy notes are now even sharper but the "fecal" notes are gone, more citrus/fruit (some say pineapple but I can't pick that up) and a similar legendary warm/soapy/amber drydown, what you'd expect an ancient Greek temple full of burning incense to smell like.

It's definitely in the same league as Kouros, and much more wearable in the summer.

Kouros Sport (which I also have) is not as good, as it doesn't project as much and all the notes are greatly diminished as if they've been diluted.

Not just Civet, the original had Costus Root too.

Google: perfume reformulated carcinogen

this was very well written. Does anyone known why the adjacent letters "fi" appear as a question mark in my browser throughout the article?

Probably something went wrong with the ligature in the font?

likely the font you see in your browser is a fallback font (that differs from the author's) which does not support the `fi` ligature

Up until not too much ago we also extracted musk essence from the anal glands of white belly musk deer. Another interesting thing is oud. It's a resin produced in aquilaria trees when infected with a specific fungus, and it can cost tens of thousands of dollars per kg. I think one of the first famous commercial Perfumes to use it was m7 by ysl, you can read an article on it on fragrantica: https://www.fragrantica.com/news/Yves-Saint-Laurent-M7-Revis...

Don't forget castoreum, from sacs near the anus of beaver.

Yep. Funny enough, in Italian beaver is just castoro

I recently did a trapping class with my youngest so he could get his license to trap nuisance animals.

I was surprised by how pleasant beaver smells. And how DELICIOUS they are.

How are they not extinct?

In some parts of the world they have been extinct. They'd been extinct in the UK for a very long time until recently re-introduced.

That's a great question, I really have no idea (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaver_hat).

I'm generally not opposed to hunting, and totally get that beavers are a nuisance to many people, but IMHO they're probably a load-bearing element of many ecologies. I was just looking at 150 acres of swamp supporting a diverse ecosystem today created by a family of beavers

Cows are very delicious to humans and make good leather, but that has been very good for there survival: we breed lots and lots of them.

If beavers became more popular as food (and for their fur, again), we would probably make sure we had plenty of them around.

> How are they not extinct?

Hats went out of fashion.

> How are they not extinct?

One species of beaver, the European beaver, almost did go extinct. The American beaver was simply lucky to live in a vast unpopulated land where it wasn't a highly desired hunting target.

I'll stick to normal exotics like Axe Body Spray.

Axe Body spray:

Alcohol Denat, Butane, Isobutane, Propane, Perfume, Ethylhexylglycerin, Alpha-Isomethyl Ionone, Citral, Citronellol, Coumarin, Geraniol, Hydroxycitronellal, Limonene, Linalool.

The perfume likely contains exotics, but the rest of the ingredients are mainly sourced from fermentation products, hydrocarbons (petroleum), or synthetic versions of plant oils/terpenes.

Coumarin came up on Hacker News recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40758767

The entire history of perfumes is fascinating, and like pigments/dyes, was completely transformed by modern organic synthesis, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfume#History and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfume#Synthetic_sources

Consider branching out to Bod.

Oud is exceptional. I highly recommend anyone wanting to explore beyond western perfumes to check out www.ensaroud.com - there's some really fantastic descriptions of olfactory notes too.

First one to use oud was Balenciaga PH. M7, AFAIK, used the synthetic oud captive. Not the real deal. Definitely the reissue (square bottle) did.

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