Like way, way too many mineral waters and
vodkas, the true cost of the liquid in
a bottle of high-end perfume is only a sliver of the total price tag. But
within that liquid’s ingredients, a manufacturer’s greatest
outlay tends to be for its rose oils. The very rarest of these is pure rose
alba — Rosa damascena — most of which nowadays retails to
aromatherapy enthusiasts.
Each gram of this oil requires about 2000 flowers.
And then there’s the oil from agarwood. When fungi infect the
trunks of aquilaria trees in southeast Asia they defend themselves by
exuding resins which saturate and blacken the effected tissue. The result,
the most precious wood in the world, emits a multifaceted, almost
intoxicating sandalwood-like aroma. Poachers have hijacked much of the
agarwood industry and driven the aquilaria to near-extinction, though a
number of parties are attempting to cultivate this
singular product.
One of the Larger Fullerenes, C540
I once attended a lecture by futurist Buckminster Fuller at the University of
Michigan. He didn’t live to see it, but in 1985 Harold Kroto (then of the
University of Sussex) and James R. Heath, Sean O’Brien, Robert Curl and
Richard Smalley from Rice University (Texas) discovered a variety of soccer
ball-like carbon molecules. Owing to its resemblance to his famous geodesic
domes, they named the most abundant version, C60,
buckminsterfullerene. Countless other sizes and geometries, more generally
known as fullerenes, have since flooded out of the laboratories. We now know
that many fullerenes had been hiding out all along in soot, meteorites,
Damascus steel, and an obscure glassy mineral
called shungite.
Buckminsterfullerene itself is a yellow crystalline solid, bright purple in
solution. It’s harder than diamond. Its manufacturing cost is
currently prohibitive, but like anything that should improve with time.
C60 and other fullerenes promise to revolutionize electronics,
materials science, medicine, energy production, aeronautics, apparel, and
just about any other field you can name.
Nanotubes are fibers whose walls consist of chicken-wire-like networks of
carbon atoms. They’re typically between 1 and 4 nanometers thick,
about 1/3000 the width of a red blood cell, but hundreds or thousands of
Tritium is used for self-luminous products
times longer. Buckypaper is nanotubes pressed into thin sheets. It’s
black, potentially many times stronger than steel but 3.3% the weight, and more
thermally conductive than almost anything else. Perhaps most strangely, it can have
a negative Poisson’s ratio which means it gets thicker when you stretch it
instead of thinner. The figure you see in the graph above translates to about
$4/cm2 or
$2300 for a typing paper-sized page.
Superheavy or tritiated water is the next step up from heavy water, using
the third hydrogen isotope tritium1. Unlike deuterium, tritium is
radioactive, with a half-life of 12.3 years. T2O is 22% heavier
than ordinary water and correspondingly thicker. Since all living things
absorb minute traces of T2O, one can use it to date
aqueous organic fluids such as vintage wine. Biochemical firms sell
T2O samples not by volume or weight but by the radiation in
millicuries (mCi) they emit. Each mCi is 37 million disintegrations per
second. The price the graph shows is for superheavy water of a purity
that emits 5 mCi per milliliter.
“Remorse of Nero” by John William Waterhouse
Tyrian purple is the legendary purple dye made famous by the
Phoenicians. Certain molluscs such as the spiny dye murex, dog whelk, and
cart-rut shell yield a clear fluid that turns into a highly saturated violet
upon exposure to air. The resulting molecule is a dibromoindigo, similar to
indigo but with a bromine on each end. Unlike most premodern dyes it’s
supremely stable and fade-resistant, but each ounce required over 3500 molluscs to
procure and so only the highly privileged could afford it. Indeed, ancient
regimes often passed sumptuary laws to prohibit common folk from wearing
TP. Said historian Suetonius of Nero:
Having forbidden the use of amethystine or Tyrian purple dyes, he secretly sent
a man to sell a few ounces on a market day and then closed the shops of all the
dealers. It is even said that when he saw a matron in the audience at one of his
recitals clad in the forbidden color he pointed her out to his agents, who
dragged her out and stripped her on the spot, not only of her garment, but also
of her property.
Tyrian Plum (1910)
With the myriads of modern colorants we have there’s no genuine need
or market for Tyrian purple nowadays, but some artists and weavers hanker
after it for the romance factor. Orthodox Jews may also seek it out to dye
parts of their ritualistic tassels or tzitzit in observance of
certain Old Testament directives. Incidentally, there is a classical
philatelic rarity called the tuppence Tyrian
Plum shown to the right portraying Edward VII, though it appears no dibromoindigo was
involved.
Suspected Red Mercury
As the old Soviet Union was dissolving in the early 1990s, rumors swirled
about an exotic, super-secret substance that could take the place of the
trigger, or at least help it along, in a plutonium bomb. A nuclear trigger
has to implode precisely and instantaneously across its spherical area to
compress the plutonium powerfully enough to set off nuclear fission. Such
a device is by necessity a technological tour de force and thus
exceedingly expensive, so any shortcut around that would be a boon to
terrorists or disgruntled dictators.
The substance went by the name “red mercury.” Pravda
reported many arrests of would-be red mercury smugglers and asking prices
ranging from $100,000 to $6 million per kilogram for the stuff. Mobsters
were supposedly standing in line to sell it to the Saudis and Saddam
Hussein.
One unnamed Russian scientist asserted that red mercury was quite
real and described it as a semiliquid mercury antimony oxide prepared by
heating antimony trioxide (commonly used in the ceramics, glass, and
pharmaceutical industries) and mercuric oxide together at 500°C for no
less than 48 hours. But most in a position to know sooner or later
dismissed the whole thing as a scam. Specimens seized in transit
invariably consisted of red poster paint, common mercury compounds, or
other swill.
Silphium or laserwort was a weed related to the asafoetida and giant
fennel and extolled for its flavor, aroma, and innumerable
medical applications including birth control. The Greek city of Cyrene
in present-day Libya based its economy on silphium and
frequently pictured it on its coins.
Much of the plant’s mystique arose from its truffle-like
resistance to cultivation, so it was only a matter of time before
over-harvesting did it in. Though botanists believe silphium
survived until the third or fourth century, according to legend Nero
(who else?) was among the last to dine on it.
At the height of the tulip
speculation mania from 1636 to 1637, thousands of Dutch
investors from all social strata sank their fortunes into various
super-rare bulb varieties anticipating vast profits. The highest prices
ultimately paid were for the maroon and white striped Semper
Augustus, shown far right, one bulb of which sold in Haarlem for
6000 guilders or about 30 times the typical annual salary of the era.
One buyer of such a bulb later found to his horror that a sailor had
eaten it after mistaking it for an onion. Inevitably the bubble burst
and most speculators lost everything. Like silphium, one can now
describe the Semper Augustus tulip as infinitely rare since it no
longer exists.
The noble pen shell is an enormous mussel living in the Mediterranean which
secretes fine golden threads to anchor itself to the rocks. From ancient
times artisans have collected these threads and woven them into an
ultra-sheer textile called sea silk or byssus. Like Tyrian purple, byssus
was always stratospherically expensive. Pharaohs, high priests, Roman
emperors, and other potentates luxuriated in byssal shawls, gloves, hosiery,
and the like.
St. Veronica
The most famous swatch of byssus is quite likely St. Veronica’s Veil, also
known as the Vernicle or the Sudarium. Legend tells us St. Veronica
comforted Jesus on the way to his crucifixion by drying his face with the
Veil, which thereafter miraculously displayed his portrait. Among competing
specimens claiming to be the Sudarium, the Abruzzo Veil, tightly
guarded at a Capuchin monastery east of Rome, is easily the most impressive.
Though the cloth’s actual image falls far short of what you see in the
El Greco to the left, it’s hardly
less mysterious.2
Byssus is now so rare that it has no real market or quotable price. A
devoted Sardinian named Chiara Vigo may be the only person in the world
still producing it.
Felipe Segundo de Habsburgo
She has visited the Abruzzo Veil and has certified it
— whether miraculous or not — as byssal. As for the noble
pen shell, its populations have slumped alarmingly from overfishing.
No discussion of largely unobtainable yard goods would be complete without
mentioning vicuña and Escorial wool. The former comes from the
smallest South American camelid and the latter from ultrafine-follicled
sheep descended from a single flock belonging to King
Philip II of Spain (1527-1598). Both vicuña and Escorial wool are finer than cashmere
and Escorial in particular is every bit as soft but wears much
better. Sweetheard deals ensure that only four firms — Brioni, Chanel,
Gucci, and Louis Vuitton — buy up all the wholesale Escorial each year.
The conquistadores and their successors nearly wiped out the vicuñas altogether
but they’ve now rebounded thanks mainly to the efforts of the Peruvian
government. The wool currently retails for between $1800 and $3000 per
yard/meter and must come with the proper documentation. Here’s some ready-made vicuña
clothing. In the classic film Sunset
Boulevard, back in the days when they mowed the poor things down with
rifles from jeeps to score their fleece with the minimum of fuss, a sales clerk
murmurs to William Holden’s character, “As long as the
lady is paying for it, why not take the vye-KOON-uh?”
1. In total there are now seven known isotopes
of hydrogen, though numbers 4 through 7 have half-lives on the order of
10-23 and 10-24 seconds. That means no superduperheavy
water, I’m afraid.
2. This is not to say people don’t wonder how St. Veronica could have possessed the astounding
foresight, not to mention extreme personal wealth, to show up at the crucifixion
with such a cloth at the ready.
