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.

Your Luxury Life By Design

Ever since Man climbed out of the Primordial Swamp as the accidental - and of course, mistaken - mutation from its original amoebic DNA, He has aspired to something He may never truly attain: interminable pointless wallowing in green slime.

Oh, wait though - Brexit!!

What am I thinking?! Dear me. 

Someone I know, who is a film producer living and working in London, commented to me some time ago, that Theresa May was one of the most dangerous people you could imagine - and that if she did not 'get her way,' she would 'blow things up.' I could never really comprehend how she ever got into 10 Downing Street, but I considered his words mindfully.

Looks black here - but the actual color is midnight blue.

As most of you know, I am of the view that we are all living in the darkest hours, walking cautiously among poisonous thorns overgrowing  rubble, and in the midst of human social and structural disasters as the world crumbles around us everywhere.

But I will show you the template of how to make it through, not only alive, but on top of great advancements which are happening and will happen yet, in spite of the rest of things you see.

Without authentic knowledge of the past, we can do nothing about our present circumstances...

The flagship color design scheme for the latest Rolls Royce Dawn.

My recommendation is not to fear seeing what others have done, learning what they have thought - yet at the same time one must filter such things through one's own eyes today, and derive something new which is both a viable solution, and creative enough to disallow simple copying. Almost everything you see today that is presented as 'expensive,' or representing wealth and wealthy people, is a lie based on substitution and parallel construction fraud.

Even the big issue about a single 'Customs Union' after Brexit, is really all about the Eu defrauding people over authentic products sourced elsewhere, and substituted for faked, synthetic, bad copies sold into the very large consumer markets inside Europe and Britain - and taxed, and with heavy duties levied as well.

You're talking about the biggest criminal gangsters running things as they never have before; absolutely certain to end in disaster.

These people are desperate to cling onto their pigs' troughs of money. It's about money and control, nothing else at all. Money... ...and control ...over you. Well, over those living in Europe but certainly casting a long shadow over the whole world.

And now, they are going 'to blow things up.'

And I will be waiting. And so now, shall you. Forewarned is forearmed.

'Big Room' music specialist Alex Kunnari, with trance singer Emma Lock.

Lyric line says:

You and me...

Won't let these inhibitions
Stand in my way
Hey!
And these fears of plenty
Building up the walls inside
I just let them
Stray
I wanna hold back these tears
I let them fall
Cause everyone I've cried for you
From feelings so natural

So let's steal these lights from the stars
And never it let it burn out
Burn out
Burn out
Let's steal these lights from the stars
And never it let it burn out
Burn out
Burn out
I know we can make it
You and me
I know…

100 Year Movie Leaked On 4chan

"Even on this vast advanced orbital living platform, no one out in the general public knows about the little additional living area that also exists here. Tucked away down a side niche in the ‘Oriental’ quarter, and functioning on a slave atmosphere unit hived onto the main system, it is cloaked from easy observation by an optical diffuser which turns all light radiation emissions from behind its virtual curtain into spectral frequencies close to the most retreating of photon frequencies: IE far ultraviolet or black." (Opening paragraph "The Neon Stained Glass Murders." )

Here is part of the recent 4chan-leaked readable text treatment of the screenplay for the FULL Remy Martin '100 years movie.' It's difficult to get your hands onto the politically 'hot' parts because the film's proposition as to WHY the Louis XIII cognac, or indeed any and all alcohol becomes REALLY REALLY(!) rare at the beginning of the movie is, er - 'politically touchy' right now, let's say...The final paragraph gives the clue: something happens in the global scene which creates widespread destruction, and then some clever people implement an AI automated sequence 'human DNA Noah's Ark box' and the world with a lot less people on it now adjusts to a context of very advanced technology, AI systems running things, and a basic archive of past human culture with which to take the human race forward once more.

Meanwhile, the main character, who was originally involved with cognac houses, and who has a lot of knowledge of history, muses over the incident in the distant past, in which the Arabic scientists and learned scholars al Farabi and al Kindi saved Euclid's books from the Mongols who were burning down a great library. He then hides the Louis XIII and places himself in a suspended animation crypt...Read an extract here:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1EotMKxqpJ9Ip3LPx13Fyz8BljekrvXWVbLWP94DLL04

Derived Design, But Still Good Crafting

The Japanese ateliers - and it is a legitimate class of professional especially nowadays in Japan - have a long track record of outstanding craftsmanship in an array of different products.

This tradition or better put, legacy of a strong culture, pushes its way through even into industrial production - and many many Japanese firms have a respect for genuine authentic design input, ranking it at least at the same level as economic formulaic calculations.

Supra GT

The general public might not know that when it comes to very high volume car manufacturing, 'design' is tied to government rules and regulations about what kinds of cars automotive manufacturers can make, and there is no absolute freedom to draw whatever looks good, or even whatever is wind-efficient - instead, a large list of rules must be fulfilled first, before any 'shape' can be accepted for transferring to production.

This being so, many brand car companies will licence out a 'package; that effectively is the car shape itself, simply because that shape already fulfills those rule requirements and the licence is more to do with compliance 'packaging' rather than the aesthetics of the design.

What this means in practice, is that a range of car companies can appear, from time to time, to be 'stealing' ideas about shape, from other brands. That isn't really happening in most cases. In most cases, a design licence was bought, but the terms and the whole agreement will be 'commercial-in-confidence; even to the extent of confirming they had bought a licence.

Alfa 4C

This year, Toyota is bringing back its Supra, and this is clearly a design licensed from Alfa Romeo.

But the one thing that you can nearly always rely on, when it comes to Japanese crafting shops and design implementation units for high volume manufacturing, is the sheer standard of the 'build.'

It is true of bespoke shoes, high end watches, suits - and cars.

And it is a joy to know that these people exist and are keeping to high standards, even in today's world.

But Is It, Really?

Evelyn and Crabtree's Mysore Sandalwood original aftershave cologne - if you can even get it - is selling for $600 a bottle and upwards on the internet today.

Now this is something that was, if not altogether commonplace, it was commonplace as far as I was concerned and I always had a bottle or two in the cabinet. For me, frankly, it's not that I could no longer get the stuff - just that the shops in the city where I would normally buy it, all closed down as the nature of shopping in your average capital city changed over the last ten or more years.

I've never not been able to get my hands on a bottle. The story is, however, basically from every single 'expert' worldwide -, that the stuff is no longer produced because Mysore sandalwood (Santalum album) is endangered. 

Everything is endangered - or toxic and carcinogenic. That is why, the European IFRA 'LAW' says you cannot make or buy actual real Chanel No 5 anymore... I mean, you can, it's just that you can't in Europe from any main-street 'business.' You can, however, buy any number of bottles of colored fluid manufactured in laboratories in Europe - all at more or less the same prices as any authentic natural brewed, distilled, liquid. And sometimes, they have the sheer audacity to offer stuff at INCREDIBLY INCREDIBLY higher prices still!

...Takes fifteen years to get a Santalum album plant to grow to maturity. Takes fifteen minutes for the Bank of Beijing to buy up all the output from the farms in the Western Ghats (where Mysore sandalwood is grown) for the next ten years.

Yumthang Valley, in Sikkim - not even going to tell you what's
in there...

Yeah yeah... So, E & C's Mysore Sandalwood aftershave is 600 bucks, see.

Absolute waste of time 'arguing' with anyone over these kinds of things - be it whether or not you can really get a 'Class A gun licence' in Australia, or whether or not there are plastic Hublot watches worth fifty grand(!), or whether or not oak moss is an allergen or whether the Sandalwood they grow in Australia is actually Mysore sandalwood.

One, just one of, the Santalum Album plantations
in north Western Australia. Some of the companies went broke too.
But then they were quickly bought over... lol

They grow two kinds of sandalwood tree in far north Western Australia, and Australian artisans make the finest sandalwood colognes and perfumes. Fact. 

Is there a shortage...?

Don't care. The good stuff is bloody good. And I don't shop where everyone else shops so I don't care what they do in those other places (that I wouldn't go near anyway).