I don’t know of a fragrance fan who doesn’t need to read this. Sarah gives a really informative answer to a question that turned out to be much more complicated than I’d realised. I knew I didn’t know the answer - but I didn’t know just how much I didn’t know.

If you’ve ever wondered what an amber perfume actually is, and why there seem to be so many different kinds, have a read of this. There’s a lot to take in (I think I’ll be going back for a second read).

This is the type of thing those who are in Sarah’s Scenthusiasm community over on Patreon receive from her regularly.

It would be great if there were a straight answer to this question, but there isn’t.

Amber and ambergris are not the same thing, unless you’re French… and then they are, sometimes. It doesn’t get any easier.

Originally, yellow amber was the fossilised sap of pine trees. This amber, ambre jaune in French, is prized for jewellery and decoration. If you warm it between your fingers it does have a soft smell. Alchemists way back would grind it into a powder, dissolve and distil it to make a very expensive perfume. It didn’t catch on. (It’s pronounced like Joan, but with a softer J.) There is also a modern natural amber perfumery material made from fresh tree sap, amber absolute. 

Then there’s ambergris, or grey amber. If you’re speaking French you don’t pronounce the s at the end. If you’re speaking English you do. Amber-griss. (Like Paree and Pariss.)

They would both wash up on the beach, and both were very precious for different reasons. Yellow amber sinks and grey amber floats. 

French perfumery uses the term amber (English spelling) for modern ambergris style fragrances.

Ambergris is a material that sperm whales secrete in their digestive tracts, to surround the crushed cuttlefish shells and squid spines that they swallow, and stop them from scratching their insides to bits. Before hunting was banned, whalers used to harvest it when they killed whales for their meat and blubber. They would tow the ambergris in nets behind their boats until they reached port because the fresh material has such a disgusting smell that even hardened whalers couldn’t have it anywhere near them. After a few weeks in saltwater, it is decent enough to smell, and once it’s dried out it hardly smells at all. It would fetch a fortune back at the fish market and perfume companies would snap it up. They still do, and now that whale hunting is banned, the ambergris we used has all been washed up on the beach.

The person whose great idea it was to make a lump of whale poo and turn it into perfume is lost to history. The way it’s generally used is to make a tincture, to dissolve it in alcohol, and wait for a year or so. (Our batches are currently six to eight years old.) It really doesn’t smell of much, it just breathes magic into a composition. There is a story that Guerlain family perfumers would go round smelling the huge maturing vats of their fragrances and lob huge lumps of ambergris right in there if they felt it necessary. That no longer happens.

While ambergris doesn’t really smell of much by itself, it made an excellent fixative (like perfumery Velcro®) in the days when there were no long-lasting, strong synthetics to hold the lighter materials in place. These days there are other materials which do the job, but there’s still a strong demand for ambergris in exclusive perfumery. If a large lump of it washes up on shore (usually discovered by a pet dog) it can make the news. Many many lumps of smelly unidentified materials wash up, giving their finders hopes of great fortune but it’s rarely ambergris. 

In 1876 a German scientist called Reimer synthesised vanillin. Everything changed again.

At this point, we get a whole new class of perfumes which the French describe as ambrée – meaning ambery, amber-like or amberish. Some bright perfume spark decided that the gentle aroma of yellow amber, the jewellery stone, could be represented in scent with a blend of vanillin and natural labdanum resinoid from the cistus plant, another of those sticky materials that drip from plant bark. What this gave the industry was a much stronger amber aroma than powdered tree resin, and it was also a lot less expensive.

In English, we call them both ambers. This is all where it starts to get a bit mixed up. That’s probably because most English speakers are uncertain how to pronounce gris and jaune, we tend to call everything amber, whether it’s got vanillin and labdanum in it or ambergris.

These amber (ambrée) perfumes smell lovely and soft - slightly sweet, balsamic, exotic - and they’re often made with added spices, and sometimes with fruit too. They exist to this day.

There are floral ambers, spicy ones, and fruity ones.

But now there are “modern ambers” too, and these are the descendants of traditional ambergris fragrance.

There are several beautiful new synthetic perfumery materials which have the effect of natural ambergris. They are a perfumer’s delight – long-lasting, consistent, soft, attractive, beautiful to blend with and pretty easy to get hold of. Ambroxan, Ambrofix and Ambrox are trade names for the synthetic version of a substance found in ambergris; they are synthesised from an extract of clary sage or a species of beetle. They smell a lot stronger than natural ambergris, gram for gram. 

Then you have the super strong woody amber materials that turn up in all modern men’s fragrances you find in brown packaging, and which sometimes sneak into the blue boxed ones too: Amber Xtreme – the one you never want to spill on your clothes at full strength or it’ll last for five washes - Karmawood, Norlimbanol, Operanide and the like.

Modern Ambers – in French – are not ambrée fragrances, not the vanillin and labdanum oriental sweet ambers, they are amber fragrances, the ones that smell like ambergris on steroids.

Does this help?

Turns out the question ‘What’s an amber perfume?’ is quite a complicated one. Do you need to give it a second read? 

If you want to join Sarah’s Scenthusiasm community, you can do so over on Patreon, if you like scent, it’s an interesting place to be - Scenthusiasm by Sarah McCartney.