Ambergris, prized by perfumers for centuries, starts life as sperm whale waste
Fresh from a sperm whale's gut, ambergris is soft, pale and smells like faeces. After months or years drifting in sunlight and salt water it hardens into a dark, waxy lump with a sweet, earthy scent. In 2021 fishermen off Yemen found a 127-kilogram piece valued at 1.5 million US dollars.
It forms from a bile-duct secretion in the whale's intestines. Giant squid beaks turn up embedded in lumps, which suggests the gut produces it to coat hard, sharp objects the whale has swallowed. Most is passed like dung, though some researchers suspect oversized masses come out through the mouth, or form when a blockage kills the whale. Lumps range from 15 grams to 50 kilograms or more, wash up on coasts from South Africa to New Zealand, and most commercial supplies come from the Bahamas. A fossil piece is 1.75 million years old.
Its name began as a confusion. Amber came from the Arabic anbar, but once Romance languages applied the word to golden Baltic fossil resin, the whale substance needed the tag grey, giving ambre gris. The waxy texture later encouraged the folk spelling ambergrease. In 1946 Leopold Ružička and Fernand Lardon isolated ambrein, a nearly odourless compound that oxidises into ambroxide and ambrinol, the molecules that carry the smell. Synthetic ambroxide now largely replaces the natural product as a perfume fixative.
People have found endless uses for it. Ancient Egyptians burned it as incense; the Chinese called it dragon's spittle fragrance; plague-era Europeans carried balls of it hoping to ward off disease; and Māori chewed washed-up lumps, called mīmiha, as gum. Eggs with ambergris were reportedly King Charles II's favourite dish, and 18th-century Europeans flavoured hot chocolate with it. Dogs love the smell and help beachcombers hunt for it.
Whaling once killed millions of whales partly for this treasure, until a moratorium on commercial whaling in 1982. Trade remains illegal in the United States, India and Australia, though naturally expelled ambergris falls outside the CITES convention.
Source: Ambergris
