Before there were rakes, there were goats.
Labdanum is a sticky brown resin from two Mediterranean shrubs, Cistus ladanifer in the west and Cistus creticus in the east, both known as rockrose. In hot weather the plants sweat it out through their leaves. In antiquity nobody harvested the shrubs directly. Shepherds combed the resin out of the beards and thighs of goats and sheep that had grazed through them.
Later they built a tool for it. In 19th-century Crete it was a lambadistrion, a rake strung with a double row of leather thongs instead of teeth, swept across the bushes to lift the gum.
It is old. The Hebrew Bible mentions a resin carried from Canaan into Egypt in Genesis 37:25 and 43:11, usually read as labdanum on the strength of Semitic cognates. The Egyptologist Percy Newberry went further in a 1929 paper and asked in print whether the false beard worn by Osiris and the pharaohs began as a labdanum-laden goat's beard.
Production today is less strange. The raw gum is boiled out of leaves and twigs, solvent-extracted into an absolute, or steam-distilled into an oil. The absolute comes out dark amber-green and almost too thick to pour. The smell is sweet, woody, leathery and faintly animal, with a dry powdery edge underneath.
That last part is why it matters commercially. Labdanum smells close to ambergris, and ambergris comes from the sperm whale, which is protected. So labdanum became the main ingredient used to build the amber accord in perfumery, and it holds down the base of chypres as well.
Which leads to the thing most note lists never explain. When a bottle says amber, it is not naming a raw material. There is no amber tree and no fossilised gemstone in the juice. Amber is an accord, a blend, and labdanum is usually the largest part of it, joined by vanilla and a resin such as benzoin. You have been smelling rockrose all along.
If you want labdanum with the volume up, start with Ember, our take on Tom Ford Amber Absolute, where it sits in the heart alongside incense. It also props up the base of Bleu Royale, our take on Bleu de Chanel. Both are UK-made sprays at 35% concentration. See the Tom Ford collection or the best Bleu de Chanel dupes in the UK.
