Amber and Synthetic Ingredients

Ever wondered about amber? It's an ingredient listed in a lot of perfumes, but all I ever knew about amber was that it was some kind of golden fossilized resin material that, as far as I could tell, didn't smell like anything. Here's a link to a short article on amber: http://www.theperfume-reporter.com/Reviews_Subpage.html

There was a time when perfume ingredients were all natural. Today, synthetic ingredients are not only common, they might even be preferable. Why? The quality of a premium synthetic is going to be much more reliable than natural ingredients. Just as tomatoes don't all taste alike, natural ingredients don't all smell alike.

Another reason in praise of synthetics is that they save the environment. There's no use chopping down sandalwood trees for aromatic bark when we can conjure up great sandalwood aroma in the lab.

As a result, we're ending up with unusual type ingredients. Amber is usually synthetic and isn't even amber at all. Musk is almost always synthetic (if you don't know what real musk is, trust me, you want the synthetic version). And some ingredients today have almost perfumy sounding names like "ozone" or "spun sugar."