Orris: The world’s rarest perfume ingredient

http://www.bbc.com/travel/gallery/20181008-orris-the-worlds-rarest-perfume-ingredient

by MiriamWeiner • 8 years ago

51 24 8 years ago

bbc.com

numlocked• 8 years ago

Seems like ambergris[0] would be rarer since you can’t cultivate it in any way. Just have to stumble upon it.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambergris

majos• 8 years ago

A possible explanation, also from the ambergris Wikipedia page:

Ambergris used to be very highly valued by perfumers as a fixative that allowed the scent to last much longer, but it has been replaced by synthetic ambroxan.

But buyers still exist for the natural stuff.

A 1.1-kilogram (2.4 lb) lump of ambergris, found on a beach at Anglesey, Wales, was sold to a French buyer for £11,000 at an auction in Macclesfield, England, on 25 September 2015.

overcast• 8 years ago

Saffron is more expensive per pound, and is cultivated. So it's not TOO crazy. Depends I guess on how much is required. (still crazy though)

epapsiou3• 8 years ago

I think it has more to do with demand. Ambergris can't be found in large quantities. This makes it useless for big houses like Chanel,Dior,Guerlains etc. The other thing is consistency. The commercial fragrances want their fragrance to smell the same every year. Something you cannot guarantee if you do not know what Ambergris will you stumble upon. These days Ambergris is used mostly by artisan perfumers.

sandworm1012• 8 years ago

> Just have to stumble upon it.

You can physically remove it from the whales, which is why ambergris trade is illegal in many countries. Even where legal, you have to be able to prove that it was pooped out and found, that you didn't kill a whale to get it.

cobbzilla2• 8 years ago

> pooped out

technically isn’t the ambergris “vomited up”?

plink• 8 years ago

I would hazard that Japanese "scientists" must have vaults crammed with this stuff.

fermienrico• 8 years ago

When it comes to ingredients, if synthesis can produce exact same chemical compound, does it really matter if it is natural or synthetic!? At the end of the day, it is a chemical compound.

I presume though that sythesis just can’t produce the exact compound mixture that nature can and hence the demand for natural ingredients.

Really, people have bent over for natural things, often unnecessarily romaticizing about it in cases where we can produce the exact compound. Mother Nature doesn’t give a shit if nature produced it or some highly intelligent beings reverse engineered it.

platz• 8 years ago

We aren't living in star trek or have replicators yet.

AnimalMuppet• 8 years ago

Yes it can, and no it can't.

Yes, you can synthesize a chemical. But no, refining is never perfect. If you get the chemical from a plant, then the impurities will be other stuff from the plant. But if you synthesize it from a chemical factory, the impurities will be other stuff from the factory process, which probably will be not at all the same.

foobarrio• 8 years ago

The compounds are often super complicated though. We can run fancy wines, bourbons and Coca Cola through a mass spectrometer and see exactly what's in it... but we can't currently just create those things. I would assume something being "natural" vs not would influence consumers on wines but not on Coca Cola. If it could be done cheaply in a fully synthetic I would assume they would be the first to do it.

chrisseaton• 8 years ago

You say that the value of orris is silly because we can just synthesise it... then admit that we don't actually know how to synthesise it.

snowwrestler2• 8 years ago

15 years ago I heard the head of DARPA talk about the work that he thought would the hardest to do and the biggest reward. High on that list was what he called "an artificial nose"--a chemical detector so sensitive that it could reliably distinguish between millions of different scents.

To this day I don't think we are even close. Think about how we still use dogs in highly critical functions like tracking people, detecting drugs or explosives, or even detecting when a diabetic kid has a blood sugar level out of its safe range.

So, I think we are still a very long way from being able to arbitrarily synthesize a scent. I don't think we even fully know how a sense of smell works; it's not just the receptors but also the cognitive processing. As an analogy, look at the complexity required to understand and manage color perception. And physically, the EM spectrum is way less complex than the organic chemistry in scent.

jshevek2• 8 years ago

While research in these two fields certainly can overlap and influence each other, in the end they are still different fields with different goals:

- Synthesizing compounds

- Creating sensors to detect compounds

The goals in one field might be realizable while the goals in the other remain elusive.

HarryHirsch• 8 years ago

At times the natural product is far too complicated to synthesize. Then the chemists go off to find a workable substitute, and the art is to find a good one: https://orgprepdaily.wordpress.com/2011/10/04/a-scent-of-a-f...

JohnJamesRambo• 8 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orris_oil

It's 85% myristic acid but I would venture a guess that the other 15% is an assemblage of plant secondary metabolites that are delicate and difficult to get just right synthetically.

epapsiou3• 8 years ago

You are right a chemical is a chemical. It is just that the smell Orris (or any other smelling flower) is made up of hundreds of chemicals each with its own volatility profile. No one has been able to get it right even with modern spectrography tools. Now the real kicker is even with the actual rose (or any other flower) oil, you can't recreate the smell of fresh rose. There is the whole field of headspace analysis that tries to cover that.

Orris: The world’s rarest perfume ingredient

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