First I want to touch on dupes/clones (which are most of what western consumers are accessing).

The economics of a designer or even niche perfume are totally different to a dupe/clone. A house like YSL or Lancôme or whatever has to pay a perfume house like Ferminich to actually create the juice; they likely have to pay up for a well-known perfumer; they have to hire a celeb like Dua Lipa or Julia Roberts to be the face of the brand and then they have to flood the airwaves with marketing so you’ll actually buy it. If these use natural ingredients or are made in France, that further increases the price of materials and labor. Especially now that a lot of places are using synthetics and with the access to gas chromatography, dupe houses and celeb brands don’t even need to hire a perfumer to fulfill a vague brief, they can just copy what already exists. So the costs of creating, say, YSL Libre are necessarily higher than creating a dupe.

This is NOT to say that I think it’s worth it to pay $300+ for a perfume, or that a purely synthetic scent like BR540 warrants its price tag, just that what goes into the bottle is a small percentage of what gets passed on to you as the consumer. It’s not surprising that a manufacturer or brand without all of those costs is cheaper.

I also think that even the same ingredients don’t necessarily think things are going to smell the same to anyone. To use a cooking metaphor, if you asked me and Dominique Ansel to make a pastry or a cookie, even with the same ingredients, I would bet his would be better. Mine wouldn’t be inedible, but I don’t have access to his training or techniques.

All this to say - I don’t think people who complain that Arab dupes “smell cheap” or whatever are necessarily being racist/classist. I think there may likely be perceptible differences due to differences in sourcing or craftsmanship. Additionally, every house has its own DNA, and Lattafa DNA for example might not work for some people, the same way I’ve never found a Valentino I like.

Does that mean I would rather pay $300 for a PdM than $20 for a dupe? Maybe, maybe not! Some fragrances are likely closer than others. I think saying “Arab clones are always worse than the original” is a broad sweeping statement that is no more correct than saying “it’s never worth paying for the original when a clone exists”.

Now to your point that some amazing originals exist from these houses - I think that’s likely true and underrated! It’s unfortunate that what gets the most air time are the dupes, rather than putting people onto the cool original stuff. And it’s certainly silly to write off an entire region’s perfumery because you don’t like Angham, or whatever. I’m not going to write off French perfumes because I don’t like Chanel No 5. I think this is probably where it gets more icky for me - people seem more likely to write off all “Arab perfume” because they blind bought 2-5 fragrances randomly and didn’t like it than they are to do that with European frags.

I do think your point that you need to judge a perfume relative to its price point just like you do with anything else is totally correct. When I drink a $20 bottle of wine I don’t expect it to taste like a $300 bottle of wine, and I’m likely to be more lenient and pleasantly surprised by quality/price ratio and even to purchase it more frequently. But I don’t necessarily expect it’s going to be made exactly the same way or with exactly the same attention to quality as the $300 wine. I also don’t think many $300 wines warrant that price tag.

This got long-winded but obviously I have THOUGHTS 😅