RETRO - Dana Ambergris Oil
Introduced: 1975 - Unisex
Notes: Ambergris
Dana Ambergris Oil is the scent of salt, wind and driftwood. Their slogan was "created for a woman to love and a man to remember".
From Scent and Subversion: Decoding a Century of Provocative Perfume by Barbara Herman:
Ambergris is the substance that starts out as the secretion in a whale's stomach to protect it from the undigestible and sharp beaks of cuttle fish. It moves on as a floating mass of what is essentially whale vomit, and then, following months or years of photoderadation and oxidation in the ocean, hardens, darkens, forms a crusty wax on its outside, and washes ashore. Perfumers prize it for its "peculiar odor that is at once sweet, earthy, marine, animalic and even tobacco scent.
An excerpt from Yesterday's Perfume:
Ambergris is an ancient perfume ingredient. Ancient Egyptians burned ambergris as incense and some modern Egyptians scent their cigarettes with ambergris. Unlike civet, castoreum and musk which have been banned outright as ingredients in modern perfumery, ambergris has been largely replaced by synthetics because it is prohibitively expensive to use in perfume. It was banned in the 1970s, but in 2001, a 1972 ruling (the Marine Mammal Protection Act) that forbade importing, buying or selling ambergris (including what washed ashore) was overturned since it wasn't deemed a byproduct of whaling industry but rather a substance whales expels naturally.
Dana Ambergris Oil has been discontinued.
We are decanting from an unopened bottle of the original oil version of this fragrance.
