kreteknose
Active member
- Apr 2, 2023
- 554
- 213
I've been reading the old threads here and reviews on both mainstream and niche fragrances, and I'd like to understand debates about price and quality more.
Is it a constructive way of framing the question to simply ask about price tiers? What distinguishes the quality of a $20, a $200 and a $500 fragrance?
My understanding is that for $20, you can't expect a lot although there are good cheap perfumes. You might get a one dimensional, one note perfume or one that has no longevity or projection even if it smells nice. You might get a decades old classic formula sold in drugstores with no marketing. Or you might get a harsh, chemical mess, the stereotypical "cheap cologne" smell.
$200 is a more typical designer price point and you expect quality in the $100-200 range. A coherent idea, quality ingredients, a lot of R&D, and in the case of mass market mainstream designer fragrances, a gigantic global marketing campaign. There are a lot of tried and tested and easily likeable bottles in this range that are classics or modern classics, thoroughly tested over many man hours of testing and focus groups and thousands of bottles sold. It's easy to dismiss the perfumes front and center in department store displays and on billboards, but they put a lot of thought to producing perfumes that appeal to a wide range of people and can spread research and marketing costs over a lot more bottles.
$500 (or let's call it $300-$500) is far more subjective and gives rise to the most interesting debates on this forum. Brands here claim to have better quality or all natural ingredients. Not sure what that necessarily means for modern perfumes, but Roja SAs claim the perfume has real ambergris in it, etc., etc. (But generally all perfumes have certain synthetic or processed ingredients.) Maybe you also have more niche formulations that are necessarily in smaller batches because they appeal to smaller market segments. On a related note, you may get actual or artificial scarcity with smaller batches and limited distributions. And you definitely get a lot, lot, lot of marketing, from Xerjoff putting pieces of meteorites in boxes of their Shooting Star line to the entire Creed story about serving kings.
My understand is that ingredients and formulation are a tiny percentage of the price of a bottle, so don't get carried away trying to correlate price and perceived quality. Past a certain threshold (maybe $100-$200), the increase in quality from any increase in price is increasingly marginal and subjective. So if you find something you like and you've tested it enough to consider factors that are less obvious at first such as longevity, be happy to own it. You should not get carried away by distinctions between mass market mainstream perfumes and niche brands, and should understand why you might like a niche brand more such as a specific perfume having a specific note or twist not found in another.
Is this a fair summary of the price and quality debate, and what are good references to read further on?
Is an article like this fairly accurate? https://splashofscent.com/perfume-expensive/
Is it a constructive way of framing the question to simply ask about price tiers? What distinguishes the quality of a $20, a $200 and a $500 fragrance?
My understanding is that for $20, you can't expect a lot although there are good cheap perfumes. You might get a one dimensional, one note perfume or one that has no longevity or projection even if it smells nice. You might get a decades old classic formula sold in drugstores with no marketing. Or you might get a harsh, chemical mess, the stereotypical "cheap cologne" smell.
$200 is a more typical designer price point and you expect quality in the $100-200 range. A coherent idea, quality ingredients, a lot of R&D, and in the case of mass market mainstream designer fragrances, a gigantic global marketing campaign. There are a lot of tried and tested and easily likeable bottles in this range that are classics or modern classics, thoroughly tested over many man hours of testing and focus groups and thousands of bottles sold. It's easy to dismiss the perfumes front and center in department store displays and on billboards, but they put a lot of thought to producing perfumes that appeal to a wide range of people and can spread research and marketing costs over a lot more bottles.
$500 (or let's call it $300-$500) is far more subjective and gives rise to the most interesting debates on this forum. Brands here claim to have better quality or all natural ingredients. Not sure what that necessarily means for modern perfumes, but Roja SAs claim the perfume has real ambergris in it, etc., etc. (But generally all perfumes have certain synthetic or processed ingredients.) Maybe you also have more niche formulations that are necessarily in smaller batches because they appeal to smaller market segments. On a related note, you may get actual or artificial scarcity with smaller batches and limited distributions. And you definitely get a lot, lot, lot of marketing, from Xerjoff putting pieces of meteorites in boxes of their Shooting Star line to the entire Creed story about serving kings.
My understand is that ingredients and formulation are a tiny percentage of the price of a bottle, so don't get carried away trying to correlate price and perceived quality. Past a certain threshold (maybe $100-$200), the increase in quality from any increase in price is increasingly marginal and subjective. So if you find something you like and you've tested it enough to consider factors that are less obvious at first such as longevity, be happy to own it. You should not get carried away by distinctions between mass market mainstream perfumes and niche brands, and should understand why you might like a niche brand more such as a specific perfume having a specific note or twist not found in another.
Is this a fair summary of the price and quality debate, and what are good references to read further on?
Is an article like this fairly accurate? https://splashofscent.com/perfume-expensive/
