Extrait, Eau de Parfum, Eau de Toilette: What the Words Actually Mean

Nobody regulates any of this. There is no authority anywhere that defines what eau de toilette means, or eau de parfum, or extrait. A house finishes a formula, decides what to call it and prints the word on the box. Everything below is convention, not law, and knowing that is worth more than memorising the percentages.

Which is not to say the words are useless. They tell you something real about how a fragrance will behave on you. They just do not tell you what most people think they do.

The ladder, and the numbers behind it

Concentration is the proportion of fragrance oil to alcohol. The conventional bands run roughly like this.

Extrait de parfum, also called parfum or pure perfume. Twenty to forty per cent oil.

Eau de parfum. Fifteen to twenty.

Eau de toilette. Five to fifteen.

Eau de cologne. Two to five.

Eau fraîche. One to three.

Read those ranges again and you will see the problem. They overlap. A sixteen per cent eau de parfum and a sixteen per cent extrait are the same liquid under two different words. A twelve per cent eau de toilette carries more oil than a ten per cent eau de parfum. The tiers are not rungs on a ladder. They are five bands that bleed into one another, and the house picks its word after the formula is finished.

Where the words came from

Cologne is the oldest and the only one named after a place.

In 1708 an Italian perfumer called Giovanni Maria Farina, from Valle Vigezzo in Piedmont, wrote to his brother that he had found a fragrance reminding him of an Italian spring morning, of mountain daffodils and orange blossom after rain. He was living in Cologne. He named it for his adopted city and began selling it in 1709.

What he had done was new. Perfume at the time was heavy, resinous and animalic. Farina combined bergamot and other citrus oils with rectified alcohol and made something clear and light, and the courts of Europe emptied their purses for it. A single vial is recorded as costing half a civil servant's annual salary. Napoleon carried it. Goethe wrote about it. Queen Victoria wore it. The house is still in Cologne, still in the family, and the ninth generation is making it.

So eau de cologne is not a weak perfume. It is a genre, and the low concentration is the point of the genre rather than a shortfall in it.

Extrait is older still, in the sense that it was simply what perfume was. Before the taxonomy existed there was perfume, and it was concentrated, and you dabbed it on. Santa Maria Novella had been distilling in Florence for nearly five hundred years by the time Farina got to Cologne. Acqua della Regina was composed there in 1533 for Caterina de' Medici, who carried it to France on her marriage. None of those people were choosing between formats.

Eau de parfum is the newcomer. It arrived on shelves in the nineteen seventies and eighties, and it is reported to have been driven partly by tax treatment as well as by the commercial appeal of a tier that could justify a higher price than eau de toilette. It is now the default for most of the industry, which is worth knowing when someone presents it as the serious choice.

What concentration actually does

Here is the part that gets written backwards almost everywhere.

More oil does not mean louder. Alcohol is what lifts a fragrance off the skin and throws it into a room. Less alcohol means less lift. An extrait sits close to you and stays for eight to twelve hours or longer. An eau de toilette leaves the wider trail while it lasts, and then it is gone.

Extrait is quieter and longer. Eau de toilette is louder and shorter. That is the trade, and neither end of it is better.

There is a second effect. At extrait concentration the top notes barely register, because there is not enough alcohol to carry them. You land in the heart and the base almost immediately. An extrait is not a less diluted version of the lighter one. It reads as a different composition, and in many houses it genuinely is one, reformulated rather than simply concentrated. Fresh neroli in the eau de toilette becomes orange blossom absolute in the extrait.

Why an eau de toilette can outlast an extrait

Because longevity is a property of the materials, not the percentage.

Sandalwood holds on skin for a day. Limonene is gone inside the hour at any concentration you like. An eau de toilette built on amber, musk and sandalwood will outlast an eau de parfum built on citrus and light florals, and the labels will tell you the opposite.

The great long-wearing classics make the point better than any argument. Shalimar, Mitsouko, L'Heure Bleue, Eau Sauvage and Pour un Homme were all launched as eaux de toilette, several of them at three to eight per cent, and their presence outlives a great many modern extraits.

Perception does not scale neatly either. Doubling the concentration of a formula does not double how strong it smells. It raises perceived intensity by considerably less than half.

Outside the system

Attars sit outside all of it. Made in the Middle East and traditionally alcohol-free, they are oils and absolutes worn neat and applied by touch rather than sprayed. Alessandro Gualtieri of Nasomatto went to Oman, India and Yemen to learn how they are made before he founded his own house, which is one reason his work behaves the way it does.

Solid perfumes, oils and body products belong here too. No alcohol, no lift, no trail. They are worn for the person who gets close enough.

What to do with all this

Stop reading the word on the box as a quality grade. It is a description of behaviour and it is an unreliable one.

Ask what the fragrance is built from. Woods, resins, amber and musk last. Citrus and green notes do not, at any concentration, and a house that builds a cologne knows that and intends it.

Ask how you want to be smelled. If you want a room to know you have arrived, an eau de toilette or an eau de parfum with lift will do it. If you want something that is still there at six in the evening and that people notice when they are near you, take the extrait.

Then test it on skin, on a day when you are not deciding anything, and give it four hours. Most of what a concentrated perfume does happens after the first twenty minutes, which is exactly the part nobody experiences at a counter.

How this plays out in our edit

Nasomatto makes extrait and nothing else. No eau de parfum, no eau de toilette, no ladder at all. Thirty millilitres, which holds roughly the perfume oil of a hundred millilitres of eau de toilette, and one application is the whole instruction.

Santa Maria Novella runs the other way. The Firenze 1221 fragrances are eaux de cologne, the format Farina invented and the Officina had been working in long before he named it. They are bright, they lift, and they ask to be reapplied. That is the genre behaving correctly.

Matière Première sells six millilitre bottles, which is the honest way to learn how a concentration behaves on your own skin before spending on a hundred.

All of them are open at Red Hill. Lucy Borland, our perfume sommelier, runs the masterclasses, and an hour with the bottles open will teach you more about concentration than this article can.