Welcome to Fragrance Friday, where each week weโll be keeping you abreast of the newest and most iconic releases in the dynamic world of menโs fragrances. Born out of the desire to showcase one of the most overlooked, yet versatile, elements of any discerning manโs style this weekly column will help you finesse your own signature scent. This week we take a look at expensive perfume ingredients.
Iโve spent the past few editions of this weekly column highlighting some of the best menโs perfumes for different occasions and tastes, like the best perfumes inspired by travel and some of the best affordable menโs perfumes. Now I want to turn to something a bit different, given itโs better to know about the more granular details of something as vast and complex as niche perfumery if you really want to be able to discern quality from cash-grab.
As such, Iโve rounded up three of the rarest and most expensive ingredients in perfumery. The following are highly sought by perfume houses around the world, but grabbing raw, natural versions of these ingredients often makes little financial sense.
A lot of brands, especially designer labels and celebrity fragrances, want their margins to be as wide as possible so would often turn to overly-worked synthetics to try and recreate some of the below.
As the great Marvin Gaye once said โ โainโt nothing like the real thing, baby.โ
From Orris to Bulgarian Rose, if a perfume uses absolutes or essential oils (Iโll explain the difference below) then that means have taken these natural ingredients and worked highly concentrated extracts into the fragrance profile. What you can expect, then, is to get as close as possible to the real thing, with the essence of these expensive perfume ingredients captured in the top, heart and base notes and blended with complementary, or contrasting notes to help you work up your signature scent.
Below youโll find three of the rarest perfume ingredients thatโll help act as a stamp of quality next time youโre in the market for an expensive menโs fragrance to help build up a sense of occasion.
There are others, of course. Oud and musk (actual musk, not the synthetic kind) are two of the other big ones but they are so common nowadays and typical that weโve stuck with three of the more obscure โ ambergris, orris and Bulgarian rose.
Essential Oils Vs Absolutes
Absolutes and essential oils are what you should be looking out for in the notes of these various perfumes. The difference between them isnโt major and has everything to do with how these fragrances are extracted from their sources. Both of them represent highly concentrated extracts from flowers or plants, but thereโs a difference in technique.
Essential oils are extracted from their sources typically through steam distillation, whereas an absolute uses a solvent to extract the fragrance. This could either be hexane or ethanol, resulting in a slightly stronger extraction with more aromatic details of the source.
If you see something like โOrris Absoluteโ listed in a note, then know that the fragrance note is as close to the natural scent of Orris as possible, given the method used is more effective at capturing the nuance of more delicate substances.
The solvent method is generally preferred when dealing with something like Bulgarian Rose, which like other ingredients such as Jasmine, is harder to extract.
3 Rare & Expensive Perfume Ingredients Used In Luxury Perfume
Ambergris
Letโs start with Ambergris, as itโs one of the more interesting ingredients in all of perfumery and is increasingly rare given it actually comes from 1% of the worldโs population of sperm whales. I wrote a detailed explainer of how Ambergris is made and why itโs so rare โ you can read it here.
The long-short of it? Ambergris is formed inside a sperm whale to protect its insides from the sharpness of squid beaks and cuttlefish, after which it is flushed out as excrement and spends years floating in the ocean, taking on the natural scents of the sea and sun before changing colour and washing up on shore.
The active component, ambrein, is responsible for the storied aphrodisiac effects of this perfume ingredient, which is often used in expensive perfumes to extend the life of the scent. As such, Ambergris is so highly-prized in perfumery that, in 2006, a couple made ~AU$381,508 after finding a lump on a beach in South Australia. Itโs surely the most sought-after of the worldโs most expensive perfume ingredients.
Perfumes that use Ambergris
Creed โGreen Irish Tweed
Amouage โAshoreโ
Atkinsons โScilly Neroliโ
Orris
Many claim Orris as the single best perfume ingredient in history. Iโm not going to argue with some of the worldโs greatest perfumers on this one so Iโm just going to agree.
Itโs not hard to smell why. Providing youโve got a perfume committed to capturing the natural nuances of the orris flower then you can expect shades of raspberry, violet and pepper to add a very complex spicey-sweet dimension to any perfume.
These flowers grow in abundance in the famed wine region of Chianti, Tuscany outside of Florence. Harvesting them is known as a very labour-intensive process which is why itโs estimated that high-quality Orris can fetch more than 50,000 (AU$74,456) per kilo.
Considering it takes half a tonne of Orris root to produce a single kilo of essential oil, you can see why only some of the worldโs most valuable luxury perfumes make use of true Orris.
Perfumes that use Orris
Amouage โOrris Wakanโ
Roja Parfums โOceaniaโ
Bulgarian Rose
Extracted from Rosa damascena (or damask rose), which is native to Persia but also grown commercially in Bulgaria and Turkey, Bulgarian rose oil is widely known as the highest quality of all the many rose oils out there. If youโre thinking rose isnโt common in menโs perfumes then thatโs because youโve been playing the lower end of the scale.
Bulgarian rose isnโt so overly sweet, but rather quite muted and sophisticated. Thatโs why itโs such a valuable player in the game, being able to add that essential rose note to a profile yet still playing harmoniously with the other ingredients. Plus, itโs more expressive of the terroir in which it is grown, typically building up notes of honey, cloves, lemon peel, raspberry and cinnamon as small nuances to help lift the rose note.
Because of this, Bulgarian rose is the preferred form of rose in a lot of designer perfumes from labels such as Givenchy, Bvlgari, Tom Ford and Christian Dior. But some of the best expressions of Bulgarian rose are, as always, found in niche perfumery. The Maison Francis Kurkdijan Paris one I listed below is ridiculously good.
Perfumes that use Bulgarian Rose
Tom Ford Noir
Maison Francis Kurkdijan Paris โLโHomme A La Roseโ
