Is It Only 'Emotional Value' That Is The Key Component Of Luxury Pricing?

One of our correspondents here sent us some info on the latest million-dollar escapade in Dubai - the Asgharali Shumukh: the world's most expensive perfume. 

All the general media coverage repeats basically the same press release content, namely that it is the world's most expensive perfume.

As far as public information goes, up until Shumukh, Clive Christian of Londonistan held the crown as the producer of 'the world's most expensive perfume.'

It appears that the price of Shumukh is around $1.3 million.

And a word should be said about the tendency at the present time, for commentators and 'experts' in the field concerned, to place some kind of important emphasis on the longevity of the perfume on a person, once it is 'deployed.' They use phrases like 'beast mode...'

Arabic perfumes and Indian essential oils are not the same as perfumes that most of us would be familiar with, which use perfumer's alcohol and quite sophisticated techniques to make the olfactory ingredients in them miscible into the virtually always clear carrying liquid. And you generally cannot mix Arabic oils and attars into any alcohol to 'extend' it or even dilute it.

'Little' Ali - Asgharali - the house that makes Shumukh, also makes oh I dunno, hundreds, maybe, of other Arabic perfume oils and attars.

As soon as they announced their 'world's most expensive' perfume - the sales of all of their other perfumes went up considerably, especially in the Middle East.

This is a nice Western cologne-style item from
Asgharali - not expensive...

When luxury brand marketers look at brands such as, for example, Rolls Royce, they place a large component of the pricing under the heading 'emotional value.' In the time of Margaret Thatcher this was used almost to destroy the brand itself and ended up in seeing the company go to German owners, and away from its traditional English owner group.

If the emotional value is authentically there, then for a short while, you can smash the underlying craft and materials and content value and exploit the intangible 'emotional value' in order to make an exaggerated profit.

Asgharali, albeit having been in existence for over a hundred years, and I think begun in Bahrain, is not a known brand in the West. And there is no basis to think that anyone in even the cognoscenti strata can have had that much pre-existing knowledge of the actual fragrance of Shumukh itself, to consider it or to deem it 'the BEST' perfume ever - and certainly there is no basis for a real product emotional attachment value component to its pricing.

Again, the impact of temperature and atmospheric conditions plays such a huge factor in how the human brains senses fragrance, that something heavy in England, makes no impression at all in the humidity of Brazil; there is literally a kind of improbability to really, such a thing as globally 'the world's actual best perfume.'

In any case it is more the bottle and plinth which comes with Shumukh that actually has the physical materials that are expensive - hundreds of diamonds and some artistry and so on.

Now there are other 'secrets' to do with the scientific differences between perfumes as made and used in the West, and typically, the compounds that make up 'oudh' oils which are traditionally the format for fragrances in the extremely hot Middle East. And I'm not going to be going into them here...

Oudhs and Arabic perfumes have the status and variances that here in the West one might associate with bottles of vintage wine...

As I once told you all, the recent Chateau Angelus - at the time selling at $30 a bottle, was easily as good as any of the major brand names everyone knows: Lafite, Latour, Haut Brion, Mouton Rothschild. 

So now we are talking around $1,000 a bottle.

LOL

Yet there is such a thing as arguably 'the world's greatest perfume' or perhaps the world's three or four greatest perfumes of all time (and which are still available if you know where and how). And there are definitely ones that will make you feel like a million dollars and give those around you the same impression.