Quote:
Originally Posted by
Kralizec
A buddy of mine wrote a piece for Businessweek about whale vomit—enjoy.
The easiest way to recognize ambergris is by smell. Fresh ambergris, straight out of the whale, has an odor that’s often likened to “scented cow dung.” But after floating in the salty ocean for decades or more, it can take on a very different odor, described as reminiscent of tobacco, Brazil nuts, a fern copse, or the wood in old churches. “The problem with trying to describe the smell of ambergris,” says Kemp, “is that it really only smells like ambergris.” When used in perfumes, it’s rarely the dominant scent. Rather, it acts as a fixative and fragrance amplifier. Douglas Stewart, a chemist at Salt Lake City’s Scentsual Antiquities, which supplies ambergris to perfumers, says it “alters the quality of the existing notes and makes them bigger, deeper and more expansive than they can ever be on their own.”