allure, poison, one, organza, 5, what these names have in common?

Today's Index article about fake-real perfumes is outstanding.

they are so nice and smell so goooood...

Yes, in Hungary you can buy last fashion perfumes for less then the half of the price of the one you buy in the shop. They mention how these "Chinese" sellers can sell them so cheap: one, or they are fake and produced by a company with cheap ingredients that smell close to the original ones, or they are the original ones sold by the wholesale shops to these small shops. Of course if you ask your Chinese seller why his product is cheaper than in the big shop they say the reason is simple as they don't have to pay expensive shopping centres rent, but I can be sure it is the original. How can it be?

Well, we're talking scents. Smelling good is big business - the perfume industry makes around 24 billion Swiss francs a year. Yet we don't know how highly profitable and even secretive industry this is.

Consider the price of the perfume. The liquid in the bottle represents only 3 per cent of the total cost of producing it.

The other 97 per cent goes to marketing, packaging and advertising. And the selling price allows for a 95 per cent profit margin. There's a lot of money to be made in making the rest of us smell better.

This is what happens with the apprehended 'fake' perfumes...

Science is partly to blame. Today, your favourite scents are not coming to you from the garden, but rather straight from a laboratory - they are created from synthetic molecules, not from flowers. Techniques like chromatography are dominating this area.

Discovered in 1876, the use of synthetic scents revolutionized the world of perfumery. Suddenly, scents lingered longer and could be produced in large quantities. The creative possibilities increased dramatically and at a fraction of the cost of the real thing.

It is like did you know it takes 750kg of jasmine flowers to create 1kg of essential oil, which is base of perfumes? As it is not enough, in France, jasmine blooms only from August to October, and must be picked by hand during the few hours of the day that the petals are open!

The rose doesn't make life any easier. It must be picked by hand, flower by flower, at sunrise. When a kilo of rose absolute can cost up to 6 000 Swiss francs. Its synthetic equivalent costs only 600 CHF, it's not hard to see why the perfume industry has embraced synthetic scents.

And you say, but what about those perfumes advertised by the famous actresses? They are much cheaper...yeah, and the fact that they also use cheaper ingredients is the reason why they are more affordable and easy to get to more people.

When I buy a perfume I usually try it on later I come back if I decided to buy, because I like to check for long it stays on me, which basic and heart scents it will free up later on and so on. It is in fact very confusing going up to a department store counter, who was never pushed to buy this or that perfume? More dangerous is to buy them online (of course if you never tried or just because they smell good in your friend. In my experience, these are the people who won't like what they are buying.

So, take care with shiny-bright-glimmering advertisements, you should buy what smells good to you, regardless of anything else. Why? because what perfume you wear is the equivalent of reflecting our personality in the scent that we choose.

The sense for smell is the most closely tied to emotion, do you remember when you were little the smell of that cake or sweet your grandma prepared just for you? Also, people often have powerful responses to specific odours. What you choose will have an effect on you and those around you. So, we should be careful in every instance.