Reality television producers are looking for the “Indiana Jones of perfume” to scour exotic locales for perfume ingredients for an Animal Planet show. This might actually be a hit.
Here are five perfume ingredients that would make great television fodder.
Abergris (a.k.a. whale puke)
Squid make for a tasty meal for sperm whales, but the whales can't digest the squid's beak. So their whaley intestines cloak the beaks in a paste. The whales then spit the paste-coated beaks into the ocean, and the salt in the water and the sun in the sky give the paste its odor. Just watching this guy talk about it is fascinating.
Civet.
According to the Guardian civet is "a fecal paste extracted from the anal glands of the civet cat." In this video, a man discusses what raw civet oil smells like: "A mixture of a cat's spray marking its territory and a dirty litter box — just fecal, and just pungent."