Changing their appearance to look better or at least
different to the rest has been an obsession to for human beings since ancient
times. Even our most primitive ancestors used chemical products to modify the
colour of their skin and hair or their bodily smell.
Perfume container from Rome, by Dennis Jarvis |
In fact, perfumes are not only one of the first cosmetics
produced by primitive humans, but also one of the most common, produced and
sold nowadays. Classically perfumes are made up of three different groups of
fragrant substances according to the duration of their smell, called low,
medium and high notes.
High notes are fleeting essences, usually derived from
flowers or other odorous parts of plants. Medium notes are slightly more
lasting than high notes and also come from plants. Finally, low notes are the
most persistent ones, are the responsible for the central smell of the perfume,
that one that is present for hours. Low notes are mainly obtained from animal
fluids, such us some sexual glands.
One special product used to obtain low notes is distilled from
an strange material that sometimes appears in on the coast of Nordic countries.
It is a spherical grey greasy structure called ambergris. The origin of this
substance was a mystery for centuries.
To discover its precedence we must travel to the deep cold
parts of the Atlantic Ocean. It is not easy to assume that three quarters parts
of our planet surface is covered by several kilometres of water, and we know
much better the characteristics further places such as the Moon or Mars’
surface than this profound zone of our own planet.
Hidden in that obscure world lives one of the most
mythological animals, the giant squid, that is the largest known invertebrate
and one of the five largest animals in general. It is so strange that nobody
achieved recording a live giant squid until 21st century and we were only able
to meet them when they died in superficial zones and their corpses were carried
by oceanic current to the coast. Something quite infrequent.
The main predator of this legendary animal is the sperm
whale. This cetaceous is capable of diving to the deepest part of the ocean to
hunt giant squid. It is not, however, an easy task. We must realise that in
abyssal zones there is not light, so the preys must be located by echolocation.
Some parts of the squid, besides, are not digested easily. Although the animal
is covered by a soft muscular mantle, in its interior it has a cartilaginous
skeleton (that lots of us have tasted when we eat roasted squids). And its
powerful beak is also extremely hard.
When a sperm whale eats a giant squid, all these hard
remains can not be digested properly, so they build up in the intestine of the
animal. Afterwards they are compacted, forming spherical structures. These
spheres grow slowly in the guts of the animal and, when they are large enough,
the whale vomits them.
And, yes, sometimes they arrive floating at the coast and
they are that substance that we call ambergris.
What a wonderful world we live in, a place where an strange
substance used to produce perfumes by humans is the remains of a giant animal
after being digested by the intestine of the largest carnivore on the planet,
and has traveled from the deepest part of the sea to a little glass bottle in a
wardrobe of our bathroom.
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