We compared 22,770 fragrance listings across four retailers. The same bottle can cost a third more depending on where you click.

We found 774 bottles sold in identical form, same fragrance, same size, same concentration, by two or more retailers at once. For each one we measured the spread between the cheapest and the priciest store.

The median spread is 33.2%. This is ordinary, currently sold stock, not discontinued oddities. 63.3% of comparable bottles differ by at least 20% between stores, and 34.8% differ by at least 50%. In dollars, the median gap is $33.96, the top decile runs $121.00 or more, and the widest gap we recorded was $875.05 on a single bottle live at two stores the same day.

The obvious shortcut fails too. No store is consistently cheapest; the winner changes bottle by bottle. Loyalty to one retailer is a coin flip you keep paying to take.

The middle two bands are the surprise. A bottle in the 30–50 ml band and one in the 50–99 ml band cost essentially the same per milliliter, $1.90 against $1.93, so trading up within that range buys you nothing. The discount arrives in one jump, at 100 ml, where the rate falls to less than half.

The penalty sits at the other end. Under 30 ml you pay $5.00 per milliliter, 5.9 times the 100 ml-plus rate. Travel sprays and minis are conveniences, priced accordingly. If you know you'll finish a fragrance, 100 ml is where the math turns in your favor — and when the small bottle is still the right call, our decant guide covers that trade.

That's a 4.3× gap. At the medians, 100 ml works out to roughly $34 from a Middle-East house against roughly $145 from a designer one.

Price is all we're measuring. The data holds no opinion on longevity or on how close a clone gets to the original. But the floor of this hobby sits far lower than the designer counter suggests, and the shelf is deep: those 1,720 listings are hardly a niche corner of the catalog.

26.2% of the listings in our catalog advertise a "was" price, the struck-through number that makes today's price look like a win. We run every one of them through a plausibility test: the reference price can be no more than 4 times the asking price. It's a generous bar, and 97.1% clear it.

172 listings fail: 2.9%, about 1 in 34. The typical failure is sloppy: a full-bottle list price parked on a travel-size listing, so the mini appears steeply discounted against a bottle it never was.

Our policy when a claim fails is to refuse to display it. You see the price. The fiction stays off the page.

We've been recording price history since July 25, which gave us 16 days of recorded history at the time of this snapshot. Sixteen days is the whole record, so treat this as an early reading.

In that window, 270 listings changed price, with movements breaking 194 drops to 87 rises, about 2.2 falls for every rise. The median drop was 13.3%.

The quieter fact is that over 98% of prices didn't move at all. Fragrance pricing is mostly a still pond, punctuated by drops. Waiting for a specific bottle to go on sale is a long game, but when movement comes it tends to favor the buyer — the weekly drops report exists to catch it when it does. We'll rerun this once the window is measured in months.

Everything above was computed on August 9, 2026 from our full catalog of live listings, ingested from authorized merchant and affiliate data feeds, never by unauthorized scraping. We report medians throughout because fragrance prices are right-skewed; a handful of four-figure bottles would drag averages upward and misrepresent the shelf most people actually shop.

Store-to-store spreads in Finding 1 compare only identical variants, matched listing to listing on fragrance, size and concentration. Bundles and gift sets are excluded everywhere, since their contents can't be priced per milliliter. Findings 3 and 4 apply size floors of 30 ml and 50 ml respectively, to keep the small-bottle premium from contaminating the concentration and house comparisons. The price-movement window covers the full extent of our recorded history and is stated as such.

We leave the four retailers unnamed by design: the finding is the spread itself, and today's cheapest store may not be tomorrow's. Daily Fragrance Scout is affiliate-funded and discloses it. Commissions play no role in these numbers, which come from the catalog as recorded.

Questions, corrections, or requests for the underlying aggregates: contact@dailyfragrancescout.com. If you cite this study, link this page — the numbers here are frozen to the date above, and future editions will be published separately.