A brief, fascinating history of ambergris

[Still Waters]

In a sparsely furnished office building in the shadow of the Burj Khalifa, the record-breaking skyscraper that towers over Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, Farook Kassim reaches into a desk drawer, extracts a small plastic baggie, and offers up its contents for inspection. Inside is what looks like a stone the size of a thumb, white flecked with brown and gray. Its light color denotes high quality. The fragrance from the baggie is subtle and refined: musky with hints of tobacco and the ocean.

This is ambergris, one of the world’s unlikeliest commodities. The waxy substance formed in the gut of around one in 100 sperm whales is frequently described as vomit, but is almost certainly expelled from the other end of the animal. Fresh ambergris has a strong fecal odor and is much less valuable than aged specimens. Despite its origins, ambergris, with its unique scent, fixative properties, and perceived ability to elevate other olfactory notes, has been prized by the perfume industry for hundreds of years. It has also been consumed as a delicacy and administered as medicine. At times, it has fetched prices more than twice that of gold. Today, it still changes hands for up to US $25 per gram, a price approaching that of platinum and many times that of silver and can mean a payday of thousands of dollars for a tennis ball–sized chunk.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/brief-fascinating-history-ambergris-180978517/