Decant or full bottle?
A decant is a small amount of the same fragrance, decanted into a plain atomiser by a reseller. It costs less to buy and more per millilitre. Here is how much more, measured against our own catalog rather than asserted.
The premium, measured
Across 770 fragrances that we currently price as both a decant and a full bottle, the decant costs a median of 95% more per millilitre than the bottle of the same fragrance.
That figure compares each fragrance against itself. Comparing all decants against all bottles would say something different and less useful, because decants skew toward expensive houses — the result would describe which fragrances get decanted rather than what decanting costs.
Where per-ml stops falling
| Size | Median per ml | Measured |
|---|---|---|
| 1–9 ml | $5.99/ml | 2,511 |
| 10–29 ml | $4.50/ml | 925 |
| 30–59 ml | $3.18/ml | 603 |
| 60–99 ml | $2.07/ml | 278 |
| 100–149 ml | $1.55/ml | 1,050 |
| 150 ml and up | $0.75/ml | 34 |
Per millilitre keeps falling as bottles get larger, and in today's catalog it is lowest at 150 ml and up — $0.75/ml against $5.99/ml for 1–9 ml. Bands with fewer than 20 measured sizes are omitted rather than shown, because a median over a handful of variants beside one over hundreds reads as equally reliable and is not.
What the numbers do not tell you
The premium is the whole of what we can measure, and it is not the whole of the decision. A decant costs less in absolute terms, which is the point of it: paying 95% more per millilitre for 10 ml is a smaller risk than paying less per millilitre for 100 ml of something you stop wearing.
We have no data on how a fragrance performs, how long a bottle lasts you, or whether a given reseller decants carefully — so this page does not tell you which to buy. It tells you what the price difference is, which is the part nobody else publishes.
Decants are labelled everywhere they appear on this site, and they are excluded from the headline price on a fragrance page. A $4.50 sample is not what a fragrance costs.
How price per millilitre is calculated, and the cheapest right now