Ambergris: The Sperm Whale’s Gift of Floating Gold
by Chandra Shukla
Ambergris, as a perfumery ingredient has made a dramatic comeback in recent years. This is due to the fact that the internet and connoisseur demand in general has influenced niche perfumers to work with compositions in a more olfactory art-oriented perspective while working with more invaluable ingredients and limited edition runs of perfume as opposed to mass produced shelf brand perfumes made purely from aroma chemicals, synthetics and reproduceable ingredients in abundance. As more people studied and understood what ambergris was, the demand for it escalated as well.
So what is ambergris? Ambergris is a substance that isn’t simply dismissed as sperm whale dung or vomit because the circumstances for ambergris production are far more specific. Ambergris is produced when sperm whales attempt to digest cuttlefish and/or other large squids. In the process of attempting to eat the squids, the whales cannot digest the beaks of said animals. As a compensating result, the sperm whale discharges a waste product from its intestines out through its bile duct. Over time this waxy discharge becomes cured on the ocean’s surface by salt, sea and sun. The fresher the ambergris, the more fecal and less desired it is; the whiter the ambergris, the more aged, valuable and prized it is as white ambergris in a tincture results in a very sweet perfume not to mention the fact that the specimen has survived several years of curing on the ocean’s surface as floatsome. The gradation of ambergris in terms of its age, its qualities and fragrance characteristics can be distinguished also by categorizing it by its color. Black, gold, grey and white ambergris are the colors and they vary depending on many different conditions, the type of squid involved, age, the weather etc..
There should never be any reason to hunt a whale from ambergris as the ambergris found in the cavities of a living well is not going to be the seasoned variety that perfume can be made from. The ambergris we source is always ‘beached’ meaning, found on the shore or floating to. Hunting a whale for ambergris is vile and should be condemned.
So then one may ask, “can ambergris be distilled?”. The short and simple answer is “no”. You would need significant amounts of ambergris to distill ambergris oil, and because of its rarity this is an impossible task that even the wealthiest and well-funded perfumer would never do. The proper way of preparing an ambergris tincture is to first macerate it (via mortar and pestle or to use a microplane grater) and then immerse the ambergris maceration into perfumer’s alcohol or an oil such as sandalwood, both in a 10-11% concentration of ambergris to the carrier. There are mentions of people using carrier type oils such as jojoba or almond but in my personal opinion this should be avoided as it devalues the ambergris. The desired outcome as a malleable end product for perfumery would either to be an ambergris resinoid, which results over time from dehydrating the alcohol tincture, or letting a substance such as sandalwood bring out the sweeter properties of it as the tincture ages, evaporated and solidifies into such a state over time.
In my history of creating perfumes for XAMBUCA OLFACTORY, I have experimented and used different shades of ambergris in many of the compositions I offer. Some may wonder why such little tiny one dram bottles go for so much. The answer is the ingredients. We may not offer a lot, but the potency and craft of each bottle contains a blend that allows you