Instead of smelling icky, castoreum has a musky, vanilla scent, which is why food scientists like to incorporate it in recipes. While most anal secretions stink-due to odor-producing bacteria in the gut-this chemical compound is a product of the beaver’s unique diet of leaves and bark, Crawford added. The fragrant, brown slime is about the consistency of molasses, though not quite as thick, Crawford said. Because of its close proximity to the anal glands, castoreum is often a combination of castor gland secretions, anal gland secretions, and urine. “I tell them, ‘Oh, but it’s beavers it smells really good.'”Ĭastoreum is a chemical compound that mostly comes from a beaver’s castor sacs, which are located between the pelvis and the base of the tail. “I lift up the animal’s tail,” said Joanne Crawford, a wildlife ecologist at Southern Illinois University, “and I’m like, ‘Get down there, and stick your nose near its bum.'” Food and Drug Administration lists castoreum as a “generally regarded as safe” additive, and manufacturers have been using it extensively in perfumes and foods for at least 80 years, according to a 2007 study in the International Journal of Toxicology. If you're interested in learning more, head over to the documentation and check out the additional resources below.Just in time for holiday cookie season, we’ve discovered that the vanilla flavoring in your baked goods and candy could come from the anal excretions of beavers.īeaver butts secrete a goo called castoreum, which the animals use to mark their territory. We've only scratched the surface of what you can do with Vanilla Extract. See the CodeSandbox below for an application created using the examples in this post. We learned how to create themes, apply variables to our page, and access tokens from our styles and components. In this post, we looked at how quickly and easily you can get started theming a React application with Vanilla Extract. Theme providers use React's Context API to provide access to theme tokens throughout your React application without needing to pass props to each-this works well but can cause unnecessary re-renders. If you have used other CSS-in-JS libraries for theming you will be familiar with the concept of a theme provider. css.ts extension is also helpful as it lets Vanilla Extract know exactly where your styles are located: This enables the library to generate stylesheets at build time and ensures that style definitions do not end up in your JavaScript bundle.īeing zero-runtime makes Vanilla Extract different from other CSS-in-JS libraries like Styled Components and Emotion both of these libraries provide exceptional developer experiences but have notable problems with performance due to evaluating which styles need to be in the document at runtime rather than at build time. The downside to this is that you cannot co-locate your styles in the same file as the associated component, however, it does create a separation of concerns and will feel familiar if you have ever used CSS Modules or written regular CSS in external stylesheets.Īnother benefit to using this specific file type is that, regardless of whether the rest of your codebase uses TypeScript or not, you can still benefit from type safety within your styles. css.ts files this could be a single file per component or shared across multiple components. Vanilla Extract enforces type-safety by requiring you to write styles in. You will also never end up with declarations like font-size: undefined in your stylesheets as your compiler will alert you to any missing or misspelled properties. A benefit to using TypeScript for writing styles is that your code editor will be able to make code completion suggestions based on the shape of your theme object. Type safety is very much at the core of Vanilla Extract. Let's take a look at what that means for theming! 100% TypeScript It enables " maintainable CSS at scale without sacrificing platform features" by being type-safe, having zero runtime costs, and utilizing CSS variables. Started by Mark Dalgleish, co-creator of CSS Modules, Vanilla Extract is one of the latest CSS-in-JS libraries to gain traction. In this blog post, we're going to look at theming a React application with Vanilla Extract, which solves a lot of our theming problems in a single CSS-in-JS library. There is a lot to consider when picking an approach to theming today: CSS variables, CSS-in-JS, and frameworks like Tailwind. Theming is a challenge that most front-end developers will have to face at some point.
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