106- What are Some of the Costliest Fragrance Ingredient

17 April 2023

What are Some of the Costliest Perfume Ingredient?
Fragrances can make you fall in love with them with their beautiful scent but the cost of some of these fragrances we love can be very heart-stopping!
Let us explore what and why these fragrance ingredients could possibly puncture a big hole our wallets and pockets!

Ambergris 

Ambergris is also known as the oxidized form of the sperm whale’s by-product and can be found floating on oceans inhabited by them. This ingredient exists due to the whale not being able to ingest the hardy parts of some sea creatures in their intestines, such as the beaks of the squid. Therefore, to protect their intestines, the sperm whales secretes and layers these hardy parts with a fatty substance, eventually excreting them out.
Like how rare we are able to observe and sight whales, this ingredient is expensive due to its scarcity. One small lump of it can easily cost a few thousands of dollars!
Their scent profile gives off a marine-like, and oceanic sweetness produces a watery, unique and pleasant-smelling fragrance that many cannot get enough of causing also a demand in this fragrance market.
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Jasmine 

Despite how popular and common jasmine seemingly is, what you see most frequently outside is jasmine oil in its synthetic or diluted form because the actual real deal is very costly.
One would need at least thousands of jasmine flowers to extract and produce a meager amount of 1ml of its essential oil. In addition, due to the fact that the fragrance is most intense at daybreak, to obtain a better-quality jasmine fragrance oil, jasmine flower picking only starts and ends from around dawn to late morning.
All the labor-intensive work adds up, low production yield and time factors to pluck jasmine are what made jasmine oil so expensive. However, with research, jasmine fragrance is now made more widely available as it can now be chemically synthesized, thus making it cheaper to source.
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Rose 

Rose like jasmine oils can be easily found sold in the market but the unadulterated rose oil is cost a lot as well. For similar reasons as jasmine, it requires a lot of manpower to harvest a large quantity (~60,000) of rose petal to produce a product of about 30ml of rose oil; which only amount to about 2 tablespoons!
Therefore, what you may typically see widely sold on the shelves of the market are the more affordable ones and mostly contain diluted rose oil. If you are thinking of buying the pure and undiluted rose oil, 1 ml (0.03oz) of rose oil can cost up to $100.
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Orris 

Orris is obtained from the bulbs of sweet iris flowers. Despite how easy it looks to extract this fragrance it is actually excruciatingly time-consuming.
The bulbs are left in a cool and dry place for about 3 - 5years to mature for the fragrance to be more concentrated as freshly plucked iris blubs are unscented. This fragrance substance that is produced is also known as irone, and more irone will be formed as more time passes, hence, intensifying the scent.
The entire years long process only produces a meager amount of 2kg of Orris essential oil per 1 ton of iris bulbs. Therefore, making it a highly expensive ingredient.
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Oud

Typically, oud fragrance ingredient is harvested from the resin of agar trees originated from Southeast Asia. However, the problem is how rare this resin ingredient is.
This resin is only formed if a certain type of mold is infested on the agar tree and the resin is judged as ready for harvesting only when the fungus is 8 to 12 years old! To add on to its rarity ranking, only 2% of wild agar trees produce this resinous fragrance ingredient, oud.
 

In Closing,
Factors that makes these fragrances so expensive are its scarcity level, its low yield produced, manpower and maintenance cost.
If you want to have a sniff of what these costly ingredients may smell like, you could opt to attend a perfume workshop and even create a personalized perfume containing the scent of these fragrance ingredients!
 
The links below is a perfume workshop that you can book to attend to help guide you through the perfume making process and allow you to have a full, fun and exciting learning experience!

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