What Expensive Ingredients Go In To Perfume?

Just because you love to wear perfumes doesn’t mean that you always know the ingredients which are used to mix them. You may have a variety of perfumes or aftershaves displayed proudly in your bathroom, each lying in wait, ready to be used. People choose fragrances for a number of different reasons, so whether you’ve bought a wide range of scents simply because you love the shape of the bottle, you want a scent for each mood, or you can’t make your mind up which fragrance family you like the best, it really doesn’t matter. However, in order to best determine the right fragrance for you, it may be useful to know which ingredients go in to the making of your scents. You may be surprised at how little it costs to make that expensive perfume you love to wear so much.

Let’s ask the experts

Speaking to James Craven, a perfume archivist from London, Bloomberg Businessweek discovered three expensive yet natural perfume ingredients. You may assume that natural perfume ingredients would be cheaper than man made scents; despite this natural assumption, you would be wrong. Surprisingly, ambergris, oud and orris are the most expensive ingredients used in fragrances, costing £35,000 per kg, £20,000 per kg, and £20,000 per kg respectively.

Expensive ingredients explained

If you’re wondering what on earth ambergris, oud and orris actually are, here is a quick explanation. Warning: You may wish you’d been kept in the dark.

Ambergris – excrement of sperm whale with a sweet, woody scent. Although ambergris is a natural ingredient, it is often reproduced synthetically.

Oud – found in the resin of wood from the Southeast Asian Agar tree.

Orris – you may have already guessed this one – it comes from the iris plant and provides a heady, floral aroma.

Some perfume ingredients are no longer used

There is a current trend for collecting old vintage perfumes – one reason for this is that many vintage perfumes contain ingredients that have since been banned from use within fragrances. The International Fragrance Association (IFRA) is in charge of producing regulation guidelines as to which chemicals and perfume oils are safe to use.

Oakmoss – a species of lichen found growing on oak trees, oakmoss was commonly used in many scents but its use has been restricted for several years.

Even certain types of musk have been banned by IFRA on grounds of not being deemed safe for use.

The rules for determining whether or not a perfume is vintage are not set in stone as you may have thought; rather, the majority of collectors of old perfume will find most pre-2000 recognisable scents to be of interest as it was at that time that many EU restrictions were put in place.

Making the decision – cheap or expensive perfume?

When choosing which perfume to buy, it’s not always about the ingredients – sometimes a high price tag can be off-putting, especially if the scent in question is likely to be worn every day and thus run out fast.

While some expensive perfumes may offer a better standard of quality that does not mean that you’ll necessarily find the scent more appealing. The main thing to bear in mind is to choose a fragrance whose scent you find attractive.

However, you may find that if your skin is prone to irritation, it could be worth spending a little extra on your perfume as the dearer fragrances are made using more natural ingredients, thus making your skin less likely to become irritated or come out in a rash.

For a really great quality fragrance that won’t cost you the earth, try thierry mugler alien available at the fragrance shop.