The Hot Needle: Finding Real Ambergris, and Where the Test Runs Out

After a full moon the high tide runs far up the sand at Mason Bay, on Stewart Island, and falls back, leaving a line where anything light enough to float has come to rest. In that line sits something grey, the size of a fist. A needle goes into a flame until the tip glows red, then into the lump. First comes burnt rubber. Then the soft spot around the steel gives off something sweet and musky, with a hint of dung or Brazil nuts, and a bead of dark liquid boils hard where the metal went in.

That bead is the traditional first test for ambergris. In September 2026 a paper in Royal Society Open Science showed where it runs out. Nine lumps in the Western Australian Museum had all been catalogued as ambergris on the strength of the needle. Two of them carried none of the chemical marker of ambergris and no detectable sperm whale DNA, and one held the DNA of a coastal dune plant. The real thing still ends up in perfume, grated into alcohol and left for months, or melted straight into sandalwood.

After the full-moon tide

The good beaches are a closely guarded secret. Kane Fleury, a curator at the Otago Museum, gives a rule of thumb: a beach with heavy swell and strong currents, "after a nice high tide, after a full moon". When Christopher Kemp, the molecular biologist who wrote Floating Gold, named Stewart Island as a place to look, he got hate mail and threats of legal action. Lloyd Esler, who teaches natural history in Invercargill, puts the southern hotspots at Oreti Beach and Mason Bay, the two beaches frequently scoured by people who know what the stuff is, and has heard of dogs trained to sniff it out. In 2019 Adrienne Beuse, the largest dealer in the North Island, would not go to the beach without a bodyguard.

In 1928 three Southland men found an 85-kilo lump on a beach near Otara and sold it to a French perfume company. After expenses, they had enough to buy their own farms.

A paperclip, heated red

Any paperclip will do. The South Australian Museum tells finders to heat one red hot, push it in and watch for fine waxy strings as the steel comes out, then to drop the lump in fresh water, where real ambergris still floats. Between them these tests clear away most of what people mistake for it. A dealer, Ambergris NZ, warns that the needle is not reliable enough for a positive identification unless you already know exactly what the right result looks like.

Lard at Breaker Bay

On a crisp September morning in 2008, a crowd at Breaker Bay in Wellington went at a giant cylindrical mass on the sand with spades, axes and bare hands, and carted it off in wheelbarrows. The hopefuls turned to Beuse, and she spent the whole day telling them that, no, she was sorry, but it was lard.

There is far more wax and vegetable oil on a beach than ambergris, and in 2016 the Bangor University chemist Vera Thoss listed what else reacts to the needle: candle or paraffin wax, residues from palm oil distillation, rubber and solidified sewer grease. Smell is no proof either. Finders have sent her samples they called attractive that she found revolting.

A dune plant in the collection

Matthew A. Campbell of Curtin University and his co-authors set the nine lumps beside two reference pieces taken from sperm whale carcasses. The lump with the dune plant in it, catalogued WAM63191, dissolved poorly and gave an infrared reading that did not match authenticated ambergris, and it held far more DNA than any other sample, none of it detectably from a sperm whale. The test aimed at plants found a single genus of coastal and dune plants, and the authors leave open whether that is contamination or a lump that was botanical from the start. The other lump without the marker carried a fatty acid that palm oil is known to supply, and they float palm oil as a possible origin. Thoss had put palm oil residues on her list ten years before.

The paper calls neither lump a mistake, and missing whale DNA is no verdict either: two other samples passed the chemistry but gave none, which the authors put down to degradation or possibly a wrong call. The needle can say that a lump melts like ambergris; it cannot say that a whale made it.

Black to white

Ambergris forms in about one sperm whale in a hundred, male or female. By Robert Clarke's account it begins in the rectum, where squid beaks and the cuticles of parasitic worms gather faecal matter around them, layer upon layer, until the rectum itself stretches and breaks, killing the whale and setting the mass adrift. Fresh, it is black and sticky; John Paice, a beachcomber on Auckland's west coast, first took it for something out of a boat's bilge. Afloat, it loses the farmyard and takes on the scents of the sea, paler and waxier the longer it floats, though its colour is no reliable clock.

The trade ranks it by colour all the same, and a lump cut open can run from jet black through brown to grey. Soft black sits at the bottom, pliable like softened tar and smelling of scented cow dung. White and grey sit at the top, with the subtle, sweet aroma buyers prize. One dealer, describing ambergris, reaches for ocean spray and a hint of cigar.

Plenty of note lists print the word and mean an accord built from other materials. Among the perfumes made with the real thing, the grade word is worth reading, and Lost Tribe, which uses natural materials alone, prints both white and brown.

Lost Tribe left deer musk and oud out of Polaris, so the white ambergris in its base has little to hide behind. It lies with creamy Black Mysore sandalwood over vetiver and oakmoss, warm and musky with a faint aquatic depth. The top above it is cold and bright with bergamot, lime, camphor and high-altitude lavender.

In Lost Lotus the brown grade goes in at the top, beside pink grapefruit and cool Douglas fir, and gives the opening a salty warmth like skin. Blue lotus and apricot-sweet osmanthus come after it, and the Padang and Hindi oud underneath is kept low.

Steeped or melted

Anya McCoy, a natural perfumer, grates ambergris to powder on a fine microplane and weighs it against the alcohol, three grams to ninety-seven of 190-proof in her example. The jar sits somewhere cool and dark, is shaken every day and left for at least six months; she draws from the clear top and tips the grated leftovers into the next batch. For AlGhaliya Bulgare Fleuri et Animalique, Elixir Attar macerates its musks but melts its ambergris, a New Zealand white, a black and an ancient Celtic white, straight into rare-aged Mysore sandalwood, in amounts that vary by batch.

Tinctures run out. In December 2024 Jono Bornstein, who founded Folkwinds in 2022 and works primarily in natural, American-sourced materials, used the last dregs of the white ambergris tincture behind the first Jasper no Kodō in a one-of-one bottle.

The third Jasper is calmer and cooler than the second. Wild blackberry and juniper open over Canadian hemlock and century-old fir, green agarwood and wild mountain thyme come through the middle, and white ambergris goes into the base with pine needle absolute and a green frankincense.

At Bethells Beach, which he had walked for almost thirty years by 2019, Paice held a strand of wire in a lighter flame and laid it against a creamy piece. Smoke curled up and left a shiny mark like tar seal or licorice. He began to say what it smelled of, trailed off, and settled on the ocean.

Frequently asked questions

How do you test if ambergris is real?

The usual first test is a red-hot needle: real ambergris melts around it into a dark liquid that boils vigorously, and the withdrawn needle pulls fine waxy strings. Real ambergris also floats, even on fresh water. These screens rule out most look-alikes, but wax, palm oil residues, rubber and sewer grease can react too, so a laboratory profile of the chemistry is the surer check.

Can the hot needle test be wrong?

Yes, it can pass things that are not ambergris: candle or paraffin wax, residues from palm oil distillation, rubber and solidified sewer grease react to it too. In a 2026 study in Royal Society Open Science, two of nine Western Australian Museum lumps catalogued as ambergris after a needle test lacked its chemical marker, though the authors stopped short of calling either a misidentification.

What does real ambergris look like?

Fresh ambergris is black and sticky with a faecal smell; weathered at sea it turns pale and hard, sometimes a creamy off-white stone close to pumice. A thin slice held to the light is never see-through, which helps tell it from wax, though appearance alone cannot reliably tell a lump's age.

How is ambergris used in perfume?

One route is a tincture: the natural perfumer Anya McCoy grates it to powder and, in her example, steeps three grams in ninety-seven grams of 190-proof alcohol for at least six months. Another is melting: for AlGhaliya Bulgare Fleuri et Animalique, Elixir Attar melts a New Zealand white ambergris, a black ambergris and an ancient Celtic white into rare-aged Mysore sandalwood.