Ah yes it was whales vomit, more poetically named "ambre gris" (grey amber) letting the client imagine some less repulsive mineral provenance. To be more precise it cames not from whales strictly speaking but from other cetaceans, sperm whales intestines rejects a very perfumed substance when they vomit. It scent was very caracteristic (source Wikipédia article ambre gris on that one). Yellow amber "real mineral amber" if you will had only one thing in common with sperm whale vomit "ambre gris" it was that both can be picked up either on beaches nor floating around the sea waves. Well...nature is dirty. Here a photo from ambergris.eu it really looks like a stone therefore pretends it was of mineral origin was easy :
At first it stinks a lot but it can be infused. The sperm whale vomits this when it eats too much octopuses and squids. It could give with little chemical operation a scent that can go from wood to animal to musk even if the initial scent is more like a mix of tobacco and human vomit but well perfumery has it roots in alchemy and they was for a long time therefore a strong tendency in it's to take "horrible" scents and transforms them in beautiful ones like metaphorically transforming kind of a "lead" scent to a "golden" one was more or less the initial idea so that is why some scent are disgusting to most people but still used in a lot of perfumes.
The "ambre gris" is very old of use in perfume but it as always been a luxury product and still is. Very rare and very expensive it is now more often replaced with an artificial scent reproducted in laboratories that imitates its original scent.
Even more the sperm whale is now considered a vulnerable protected specie since the Washington Convention of the 1 July 1975 therefore since then it is illegal to use real "ambre gris" or any part of a sperm whale in any products. Now it's artificial imitation is still one of the most basic notes in perfumery but it's no longer (at least legally but the perfume industry is self-controlled so it's sometimes hard to know the truth behind ethical statements) extracted from real sperm whales but produced as a laboratory artificial scent that imits the original one. It can be used in marine notes but that is not the most common in general it is used more in the olfactory famili of woods and musk for giving a scent of nature and animality...it can be use in marine note for a seaweed scent indeed but it's not well liked by some people who thinks it's more like stinks dead fish than anything else...this people probably have a more sensitive nose than most because well technically that is the original scent, vomit of dead octopuses and calmars.
Still it was very popular also as a jewel for ladies until mid XXth century and lot of old romantic poetry praise the beauty of necklaces made in "ambre gris". Also "ambre gris" was popular in the past for having the same curative proprieties as a cure of oestrogene now and they were very popular because they do have active pheromone that do product an aphrodisiac effect and therefore it was easily well liked by clients as it really helped seduction. It was use first by the chinese and then by the arabs as mostly a medical cure but when it arrived in europe it was so expensive there that it was always been used mostly as a perfume in the old continent.
It's true that as of now seaweeds are more and more used in the marine note in perfumery but it's still a rare and very recent tendency at least in french perfumery and within the limit of my own knowledge which is really not all that big. Some also but it's even more recent and rare use marine salt to the marine note.
A last thing that i know about "ambre gris" is that well there is a classical formula in perfumery with a head note, a heart note and a base note and of course most of the time "ambre gris" is a base note and it was a lot used in fact for it's strong scent that made the perfume way more persistent.
Well as of now it's kind of old-fashioned and very rarely used in french perfumes but it's still in artificial forms a basic of luxury perfumes but most perfum for normal people don't have that in it it's more or less a sign of wealthiness to scent the artificial ambre gris even know.
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