Who would think, then, that such fine ladies and gentlemen should regale themselves with an essence found in the inglorious bowels of a sick whale! Yet so it is. — Herman Melville, Moby Dick
Over the years, perfumers have had some wonderfully repugnant substances in their arsenal. Some, like jasmine and oakmoss, look picturesque in nature but can waltz into a perfume with manure or pond scum caked on their boots. Others have unseemly origins, like oudh produced by fungus-infected trees and various musks harvested from animals’ rear ends. Ambergris is a bit of both. It is produced in the bowels of just one percent of sperm whales from indigestible squid parts and feces, and expelled (sometimes fatally1) to the ocean’s surface, where it ideally ages for a few years before washing ashore. It almost always smells a bit like barnyard. Like oakmoss and animal musk, it seems to belong to a past age of perfumery. But ambergris has a mystery all its own, a treasure from the sea that can bring its finder a small fortune, an olfactory enigma that is difficult to describe and impossible to create in a lab.2
Molecular biologist Christopher Kemp first heard of ambergris in 2008 when a huge block of ambergris was thought to have washed up in New Zealand, where he was living at the time…
