Your favourite perfume might be made from whale vomit, here’s why

Ambergris, a waxy substance that comes from a sperm whale’s intestines, is used in some of the world’s most expensive perfumes. The substance forms in the whale’s digestive system after it eats squid, and is later expelled and found floating at sea or washed ashore — which is why it is often called whale vomit.

When fresh, ambergris has a harsh smell, almost like a faecal substance. But as it ages, it becomes more pleasant, developing a woody, musky, sweet, earthy and slightly marine fragrance. In perfumery, it is valued less for a single note and more for the depth it adds, making other scents cling to the skin far longer than they would on their own.

Vinniit Aroraa, an Indian perfumer and founder of RAD LVNG, explains that perfumers have spent centuries chasing the worst smells on earth because, diluted and blended just right, they turn into the very thing that makes people smell unforgettable.

Nearly all fragrance ingredients like ambergris are synthetic today, since natural whale vomit is too random to rely on for commercial production. Chemists have spent decades reverse-engineering these natural scents in a lab, molecule by molecule, and those synthetic versions are now sitting in almost every bottle on the shelf.

Image: Wikimedia Commons/by MuslimDon