Ever picked up a perfume , looked at the price and wondered, what am I actually paying for? the price of a perfume is shaped by much more than the ingredients inside the bottle While the fragrance itself is obviously a major part of the cost. In an interview with HT Lifestyle, Swapnil Pathak Sharma, founder of Zighrana, breaks down why perfume costs so much.
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A formula made with expensive naturals and speciality materials will naturally cost more than one built mainly around inexpensive aroma chemicals. Some materials are relatively inexpensive. Others, especially good natural and specialty ingredients, can be very expensive. So just looking at the size of the bottle doesn’t really tell you much about the cost of the fragrance inside. Sometimes you need a lot of raw material to get a very small amount of oil. That obviously affects the cost. A perfumer isn’t just putting ingredients together. They need to understand how each material behaves, how it changes when combined with others and how the fragrance develops on the skin. Swapnil highlighted that what you smell in the first few minutes can be quite different from what you smell after a few hours. Traditional Indian attar, for example, is not made by mixing a few ingredients together. In the deg-bhapka process, botanical materials are distilled into a base such as sandalwood oil. The process, the raw materials and the skill of the person making it all have a bearing on the final product.
The fragrance concentrate itself can have a very different cost depending on what has gone into the formula, according to Swapnil. When someone says “rose” or “ sandalwood ”, it doesn’t mean every rose oil or sandalwood oil is the same. “The origin, quality, extraction method and yield all matter, and with natural ingredients, there’s another factor—nature doesn’t always give you the same yield or availability throughout the year,” highlighted Swapnil.
