Amber. A smell that doesn't come from amber.

Fossil amber: a thing without smell

Amber is fossilised tree resin. Tens of millions of years ago, trees bled resin to seal wounds in their bark. The resin flowed, hardened and was buried. Over a very long time its volatile parts escaped, and what remained became something clear as stone and light as plastic.

The Baltic coast has been known for amber since antiquity. The Greeks called it elektron and noticed that, when rubbed, it drew small scraps toward it. The word electron comes from there.

For anyone smelling it, the key fact is this: at room temperature amber has almost no smell. Fossilisation took the fragrant part away. Only when burned or heated does it give off a scorched resin smell, nothing like what perfume calls amber.

Yet amber became the name of a family of smells. The smell of a thing that does not smell.

Labdanum, vanilla, Siam benzoin

What perfumers call amber is a constructed warmth. It usually has three sources.

The first is labdanum, the resin of cistus, a Mediterranean shrub. In the hot season its leaves and young twigs exude a sticky resin. The Greek historian Herodotus described it being gathered from the beards of goats that had brushed the bushes. On Crete, rakes of leather strips were drawn through the shrubs to collect it. Labdanum smells dense and warm, of leather and dried plum.

The second is vanilla. In 1874 the German chemists Ferdinand Tiemann and Wilhelm Haarmann synthesised vanillin, the main molecule of vanilla's smell. That warm sweetness became cheap and easy to find, and entered nearly every amber.

The third is close to Vietnam: Siam benzoin, the resin of Styrax tonkinensis, a tree of Laos, northern Vietnam and nearby areas. The species name points to Tonkin. The resin smells of vanilla and white chocolate, sweet and soft. In perfume it often joins labdanum and vanilla to make amber's warmth.

Three resins, three regions. None of them is amber.

Two words, two things

The story gains another layer because a second thing also carries the name: ambergris. It forms in the gut of the sperm whale, drifts at sea for years, is changed by sun and seawater, and washes ashore. Unlike fossil amber, ambergris has a real smell: sea, warm skin, damp wood.

The European word amber comes from Arabic and was first tied to ambergris. Later the same word passed to fossil resin. French keeps the trace of this confusion: ambre gris, grey amber, is ambergris, while ambre jaune, yellow amber, is the fossil resin.

So when someone says amber, they may mean an odourless stone, a substance from a whale, or a construction of living resins. Three things under one word.

A colour named as a smell

Why would a family of smells take the name of an odourless stone? No one can say for certain. But here is one way to see it: the word amber speaks of colour before it speaks of smell. Golden brown, clear, warm like lamplight through honey. People smelled labdanum, vanilla and benzoin, saw that colour in their minds, and named the smell after it.

This happens often with smell. We lack words of the nose's own, so we borrow from the eye. A green smell. A white smell. A dark smell. Amber is simply the clearest case, because the borrowed word became the name of a whole family.

The amber in your hand still has no smell. But it gave the nose a name.