
Orris: The world’s rarest perfume ingredient - MiriamWeiner
http://www.bbc.com/travel/gallery/20181008-orris-the-worlds-rarest-perfume-ingredient
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fermienrico
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.

~~~
snowwrestler
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.

~~~
jshevek
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.

~~~
snowwrestler
How do you know if you have succeeded in synthesizing something if you can't
detect it?

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jshevek
There are many answers to this question. Sometimes you can be certain of what
you synthesized based on observations about the reaction process, including
heat absorbed or emitted. Sometimes you can put the compound in a solution
with other known quantities and react them to identifiable products. You can
run the compound through a series of different tests which collectively
confirm that you've synthesized it. Spectral analysis can play a role.
Chromatography. In extreme cases, you might bombard it with radiation and
interpret the scattering pattern.

The kind of device that would function as a reusable detector for small
amounts of the substance floating freely in the air, while useful for
measuring air pollution, is rarely used when researching how to synthesize new
compounds.

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numlocked
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](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambergris)

~~~
sandworm101
>> 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.

~~~
cobbzilla
>> pooped out

technically isn’t the ambergris “vomited up”?

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epapsiou
Nope. It is pooped out.

~~~
cobbzilla
Thanks. Wikipedia [1] says you’re right, and also offers me a small condolence
that my misconception is fairly common: “Ambergris is usually passed in the
fecal matter. It is speculated that an ambergris mass too large to be passed
through the intestines is expelled via the mouth, leading to the reputation of
ambergris as primarily coming from whale vomit.”

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambergris#Formation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambergris#Formation)

