The Decant Index 2026: What an Hour of Niche Perfume Costs

A 2 ml decant of Cristal & Gold Woman by Amouage costs $198. A 2 ml decant of Ganymede by Marc Antoine Barrois costs $13. That is 15 times the price — and the more affordable one lasts longer on skin.

The Decant Index is our attempt to put one honest number on that. It is not a taste ranking and not a popularity chart. It is a piece of arithmetic: we took the list price of every decant we sell, joined it to our own measured wear-time index, and divided one by the other to get the cost of wearing each fragrance for one hour.

134 fragrances, 48 houses. An hour runs from $0.15 to $2.75 — a spread of 18 times.

Paying more does not buy more hours

Across the 134, the correlation between what a 2 ml decant costs and how long it lasts on skin is weak: r = +0.30, meaning price accounts for roughly 9% of the variation in wear time.

The band medians do climb. But every band starts at the same $13 floor, and the two largest reach $198 — the overlap swallows the trend.

The clearest case sits at both ends of the same table. Marc Antoine Barrois Ganymede, at $13, lasts 10–12 hours. Amouage Cristal & Gold Woman, at $198, lasts 8–10. 15 times the price, and fewer hours.

The cost of being wrong

For the 118 fragrances here that we also list as full bottles, the median bottle is $483 and the median 2 ml decant is $20 — a 23 times gap between finding out and committing. At the far end, a bottle of Diaghilev by Roja Dove costs $1,591 against $35 to try it, which is 45 times.

This is the whole economic case for decanting. Nobody buys a 2 ml vial because it is good value per millilitre. They buy it because the alternative costs 23 times as much to be wrong about.

Buying bigger barely helps

Median price per millilitre falls from $10.50 at 2 ml to $8.60 at 10 ml — a drop of about 18% for five times the commitment.

Decanting does not follow the bulk-discount curve most goods do, because the cost is dominated by the fragrance itself rather than by the vial, the labour or the shipping.

Worth saying plainly: this finding runs against our own interest in selling larger sizes. It is what the list prices say.

An hour of perfume is not one price

The most affordable hour costs $0.15; the dearest costs $2.75. Both are niche fragrances, both sold in the same 2 ml vial, both assessed on the same scale. The gap is a materials story: the expensive end is dominated by distilled oud, ambergris and aged naturals, inputs priced by the gram rather than by the bottle.

Lowest cost per hour

Highest cost per hour

Houses with at least two fragrances in the index, ranked by median cost per hour.

The index: all 134 fragrances

Sorted from the most affordable hour to the dearest. Every figure derives from the listed price and the measured wear-time band. Nothing is weighted, adjusted, or ordered by what sells.

† 10 of the 134 are currently sold out in every decant size. They stay in the index because it measures list price, not stock, and dropping items as they sell would make the figures move with our inventory rather than with the market. Their effect is disclosed under Limitations below.

Method

cost per hour = decant price ÷ ( wearings per decant × hours per wearing )

The index uses the midpoint of each wearings range. Our sprays guide advises readers to treat the low end as the honest number, and on that stricter basis the median hour costs $0.37 rather than $0.32. Both are defensible; the midpoint is used here because it is the standard choice, and the conservative figure is given so nobody has to guess which way the assumption cuts.

What this index is not

It is not a quality ranking and not a recommendation. A fragrance at $2.75 an hour is not being criticised: oud distilled from a single tree is expensive because the material is expensive, and cost per hour is the wrong lens for judging it. The index measures one narrow thing, which is how far money goes in hours worn.

It is also not weighted by sales. Nothing here is ordered by what we sell most of, or by what carries the best margin.

Limitations

• Wear time is assessed in-house, on skin, by our own team rather than by an independent panel. Longevity varies with skin chemistry, humidity and application, so the bands are deliberately wide: four bands, not decimal hours.
• Spray volume varies by atomiser. The 0.07 to 0.1 ml figure is typical, not universal, and a heavier sprayer gets fewer wearings and a higher cost per hour.
• Three sprays per wearing is an assumption. Someone who wears six halves their hours and doubles their cost per hour.
• The 10 sold-out entries move some figures. Excluding them, the median hour rises from $0.32 to $0.34 and the median 2 ml price in the 10–12 hour band rises from $23.50 to $32.50. The headline finding is unaffected: the price-to-longevity correlation is r = +0.30 across all 134 and r = +0.34 across the 124 in stock, weak either way. The entries are: Amouage Epic 56, Amouage Guidance 46, Bortnikoff Oud Maximus, Ensar Oud Musk Yusuf, Les Indémodables Vanille Havane, Memoirs of a Perfume Collector Tales from Zanzibar, Orto Parisi Megamare, Stéphane Humbert Lucas 777 God of Fire, The Antagonist The Void, The Spirit of Dubai Turath.
• Prices move. This edition is a snapshot and goes stale as houses reprice.

Reuse and citation

This index is published under CC BY 4.0, so it is free to quote, chart or redistribute with attribution. The underlying wear-time data is available as CSV and JSON, alongside the full Longevity and Sillage Index. Journalists who want the full priced dataset or a walkthrough of the method can write to [email protected].

Cite as: Gouttes Rares, “The Decant Index 2026”, gouttesrares.com, 23 August 2026.