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Why Is Designer Perfume So Expensive?

There is a very good reason why designer perfume is usually classified as a luxury item – it's so darn expensive. It can be more than one hundred dollars just for one ounce! There's hardly anything in the bottle, and yet you're forking out a fortune for it. No wonder there are so many discount designer perfume sites on the Internet. What gives the designer perfume makers the right to charge so much money for a wee bit of liquid?

Hard To Find Ingredients

One of the reasons that designer perfume is so expensive is because it is often made with hard to harvest ingredients. For example, the world's best selling perfume is Chanel No. 5, which has civet as one of its ingredients. Civet is a secretion from the gland of the civet cat. This is usually harvested in an inhumane way – with only a few drops from each cat. Now, thankfully, Chanel uses synthesized civet that smells just like the real thing and ca leave the rare felines (and their glands) alone.

Hard To Harvest Essential Oils

Even when the ingredients are harvested in humane ways on plants, it is still very hard to get what you need for designer perfume out of those materials. One of the ingredients used in some of the most expensive designer perfumes is rose oil. It takes one hundred pounds of rose petals to produce just one ounce of rose oil. Ouch! That means you have to go through tons and tons of roses just to try and make a few bottles of perfume.

The Prestige

Even with hard to find and hard to harvest ingredients, one of the reasons that designer perfumes are so expensive is that they have discovered that people will willingly pay more for a product that they think is prestigious. It's a bit like driving a Porsche as opposed to driving a Pinto. Everyone turns to look at the Porsche going by and everyone pulls out fire extinguishers when the Pinto comes by.

When you pay for a tiny bottle of designer perfume, you are not just paying for the perfume. You are also paying for the marketing of the perfume, all of the models and advertisers in marketing the perfume, the fancy bottle, the store selling the perfume, the company making the perfume and the name on the label. The only comfort you can get is knowing that unlike many other luxury items (like caviar), the perfume will last for years.