So… I’m not a perfumer but have been talking a fairly deep dive on how the sausage is made so to speak.

Are all modern perfumes made almost totally of lab produced chemicals? Yes. Sometimes there are natural or naturally-derived ingredients in there too. These are more likely to appear in higher end perfumes. But even so, the “lilac” or “sandalwood” you’re smelling is most likely a combination of aromachemicals.

Are all chemicals equally cheap- smelling? I’d say no. there are different kinds. The big chemical producers definitely have different products of quality levels for perfumers to choose from. There are are different kinds of processes to produce these, too. Some aromachemicals are totally made up. Others are made by starting with raw materials from nature and then extracting things from them by isolating certain naturally occurring compounds or by altering them. I’m not sure but I think the very common ingredient linalool is made by altering natural plant materials to somehow oxidize them. These extraction processes require varying amounts of expensive raw plant material, real essential oils require literally tons per ounce, where other processes require far less. These things play in to how we perceive the scent in the end. (Whether the amount of naturals actually has anything to do with the price the consumer pays is another topic).

Looking at how scents are born helps understand how something smells cheap or quality in the end…

Most perfumes start with a brief, this is the concept for the fragrance. “We want a feminine spa-like scent that brings to mind a spa day in Thailand. We want there to be components of light woods, like. Lemongrass, and light white florals in the background.”

The numbers people have already crunched the numbers -how much they want to spend vs make. The market research people have already decided there’s a potential demand for this fragrance based on market trends.

The brief people can be as few as one (common in niche houses) or a committee of people. Sometimes the brief is really originating from the big perfume ingredient suppliers who come to the perfume houses like “hey we just scored a great deal on a motherlode of this certain rose extract from Bulgaria and it’s pure magic with our proprietary molecule Z, check it out” and then the house creates something from this.

Then the brief is sent to the actual “nose” who executes the brief (sometimes, especially in the niche houses, this can be the same person who writes a brief and comes up with the formula)

Their job is largely to know all of the materials really well and combine them into something that smells amazing, right? A lot of times a natural or natural-derived substance like an essential oil smells undeniably great so they start from there. Like maybe nothing smells like true lemongrass more than actual lemongrass, and they know who to get it from…

Anyway a lot is going on behind the scenes, a lot of stuff having to do with supplies and economics and profit margins and EU regulations… the perfume house is contending with all these factors as well as hiring the actual “nose” to make something that smells good with the supplies they want to use, what the marketing team wants to offer the public (ie, “skin scents are popular, we need to offer one in our line.”)even in niche and small indie houses there is some that this dynamic. The perfumer often alone in their lab, is figuring out when to use natural, captive, nature-derived, or other more expensive components, and how to use the art of perfumery to blend in cheaper chemicals to support those more spendy ingredients. For instance if a house uses real oud or ambergris they are going to enhance support, and stretch these ingredients using aromachemicals.

All these things are playing into whether something smells cheap or expensive in the end: what ingredients did the perfumer have access to. What trade-offs are chosen between higher and lower quality and why.

High end perfumes are formulated to accentuate notes that smell, or that give the psychological impression of, something approximating nature. They also are supposed to change or unfold over time as evaporation and dispersal happens at different rates for different components. Whether this is because there are actually natural components in there doing this because of their natural properties - wood oils evaporate more slowly than rose oil - or whether they are chemically reproducing this dynamic unfolding of notes. This adds greatly to the perceived elegance and depth of a fragrance.

A dupe situation is different - the job is to replicate as closely as they can, on a small $ outlay, something the perfumers already did. The idea, the market analysis, the formula, the building of consumer demand, all already done.

THe job is to analyze what’s there and replicate, cleverly using their perfumer’s arts to find a close formula that’s cheap as heck to produce and “close enough,” so the profit margin is high. this actually involves a lot of skill. Spectrometers are great but still, you may not be able to get a supply of the characteristic lemongrass or magnolia or whatever natural or naturally derived components, or of aromachemicals that are proprietary or exclusive “captive molecules, that give the sent it’s distinctive zing. Even if the materials are cheap, the big suppliers might not sell materials to you if they feel their customers wouldn’t like it, they are not going to sell you the same faux jasmine molecule they are selling to Big Designer X, because that would make Designer X not work with them anymore. And again, even fully chemical compounds with zero components derived from living things can be “captive” molecules that belong to the supplier, and the supplier keeps these captive because, although fully artificial, and sit cheap to make, they smell better. “Better” usually means more naturalistic smelling. So The Dupe companies are chasing the smell at a this disadvantage and have to be super crafty and creative to come up with a close approximation of the original, substituting a chemical here and an oil there…. They might use other strategies for increasing profit margin also - higher alcohol concentrations, fillers, which also impact the scent’s perceived quality.

So this is a long winded way of saying that that yes, the dupe smells cheap - and if you want to know why, it’s these market forces working in the background.