EDT, EDP and parfum measure concentration, not quality

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Researched. We have not used this one long enough to give you a verdict, and we would rather say so than invent one. What follows is how it works, who it suits, and what it will not do. When we have used it properly, this page carries the verdict and the date.

Dior Sauvage Eau de Toilette

Eau de toilette, eau de parfum, parfum. Laid out in that order they look like a quality ladder, and they are very often sold as one.

They are not a quality ladder. They are a loose statement about how much perfume concentrate is dissolved in the alcohol, and they say nothing whatever about whether the thing inside is any good.

What the words are measuring

A finished fragrance is a concentrate — the composed perfume oil itself — thinned out in alcohol with a little water. The category name on the bottle refers, roughly, to that ratio.

The conventional ranges:

• Eau de cologne — around 2 to 5%
• Eau de toilette — around 5 to 15%
• Eau de parfum — around 15 to 20%
• Parfum, or extrait — 20% and upwards

Treat those as terrain rather than survey. Which brings us to the part that is printed nowhere on the box.

The regulatory bit worth knowing

No law defines any of it.

Cosmetics regulation governs what may go in the bottle and what must appear on the label. In Europe that means an ingredient list, a set of named fragrance allergens and a safety assessment standing behind the product. In the United States the requirements are lighter, and "fragrance" may still stand in for the whole accord. It does not define "eau de parfum". A house may print those three words on a 12% juice and has broken no rule, because there is no rule to break.

Most houses are roughly honest about it, for the ordinary commercial reason that a thin eau de parfum smells thin and customers notice. But the word is a positioning decision, not a measurement, and it cannot be read as one.

Why an eau de parfum is not a louder eau de toilette

This is the part that costs people money.

When a house follows an eau de toilette with an eau de parfum of the same name, it does not usually take the same formula and put more of it in. It rebalances. More base material goes in — woods, resins, musks, vanilla, amber — because those are the materials still present at hour six, and hour six is what the higher concentration is being sold for.

The result smells heavier, rounder, usually sweeter, and often less bright at the top. It is a different composition wearing the same name.

So "I liked the toilette, I will buy the parfum, it will be the same but more" is a perfectly reasonable sentence that turns out to be wrong often enough to be worth the warning. Smell both. They are relatives, not versions.

Strength and projection are not the same axis

The surprise at the top of the ladder: an extrait frequently sits closer to the skin than the eau de parfum below it.

More concentrate means less alcohol, and alcohol is the carrier that throws a fragrance off you and into the room in the first ten minutes. Heavy, slow materials do not travel far under their own steam. So the extrait lasts longer and announces less. That is what the money buys — duration and closeness, not volume.

If you want the room to know, the eau de parfum is usually doing more work than the more expensive thing above it.

A word about "aftershave"

In ordinary use the word has come to mean any fragrance a man wears. Historically it meant something narrower: a low-concentration splash applied after shaving, sitting somewhere around an eau de cologne, often with something in it for the sting.

So when someone behind a counter asks whether you want the aftershave or the eau de toilette, they are asking a question about concentration. When your uncle calls your eau de parfum aftershave, he is not.

What the label does not tell you

• Quality of materials. A cheap eau de parfum is a cheap fragrance at a higher strength, and the strength is not the problem with it.
• How long it will last on you. That is a question about your skin, and it has a different answer for everybody.
• Value. Do the division. Take the price, divide by the size of the bottle, then work out how many sprays one wearing actually takes. Four sprays of an eau de toilette against two of an eau de parfum moves the per-wear figure enough that the shelf price stops being the answer.

Who it suits

Eau de toilette for heat, for offices, for daytime, and for anywhere people cannot move away from you.

Eau de parfum for cold air, for evenings, and for anything you want to still find on your collar at six o'clock.

Extrait when you like something enough to want it quiet and close all day. It is the least sensible purchase in the category and frequently the most pleasant.

The one thing that decides whether this works

Wear it for a day before you buy it. On skin, not on a paper strip.

Paper has no temperature and no oil. It holds the first ten minutes accurately and then lies about everything after, which is most of the fragrance and all of the part you would actually have been wearing.

The product

Sauvage is sold as an eau de toilette, an eau de parfum and an elixir, side by side under one name, which makes it the easiest place in the shop to test everything on this page against your own arm. The eau de toilette is the original and the one most people mean when they say the word.

The one people are searching for is the Dior Sauvage Eau de Toilette.

Dior Sauvage Eau de Toilette

We do not print prices here, because a price we typed last month is a price that is wrong today.

Written by JamieG in Garner Town, Tennessee.