What is Ambergris?

While doing some food research and reading De honesta voluptate et valetudine (On Right Pleasure and Good Health), written by Platina in the mid-fifteenth century, I happened upon a reference to ambergris.

Ambergris is thrown up by sperm whales although there’s conjecture about what end it comes out of. Because It’s a fatty substance, it floats on the ocean, probably for many years before it lands on a beach. Despite looking like a rock, ambergris gets found by lucky beachcombers, sometimes with their chums, ambergris poodles, trained to smell it out.

When a small chunk arrived from New Zealand, I thought it was a joke. I would have tossed it back in the ocean (or never have picked it up in the first place), except for one thing: it was strangely light. Then, I stuck a red-hot pin through it and a whiff of burning  frankincense rose up, like the hot rosin my father used for soldering.

Coco Chanel said ambergris was expensive and odorless, but women wouldn’t buy perfumes without it. It’s almost certain that pheromones—compounds that mimic sexually stimulating aromatic triggers—are at play. In addition to its supposed irresistibility, ambergris is a fixative, one of a group of substances that makes perfumes last longer. While it hasn’t been used for decades, except by a small number of indie perfumers who shall remain unnamed, it adds a je ne sais quoi, a subtle, vaguely animal and sexual depth.

Raw ambergris has a vaguely marine and sometimes fecal smell, nothing strong, but nothing very exiting either. It must be tinctured—dissolved in alcohol—and allowed to mature. At the beginning, the tincture is virtually odorless, but after six months or so, it develops a strange almost medicinal aroma, some say reminds them of isopropyl alcohol, when in fact I had used drinking-grade ethyl alcohol. The article about ambergris in Wikipedia mentions this effect. lt usually takes two years for a tincture to fully mature.