Every number, and where it comes from.

01Sources

• Prices come only from each retailer's official affiliate product feed or API. We never scrape a retailer's website. Each price is stored once a day per listing, with the retailer, stock status and date.
• Catalog facts (names, sizes, concentrations, notes, perfumers, launch years, US list prices) come from each brand's own website, restated as facts with the source page linked on every fragrance page: 65 houses so far. Identifiers come from Wikidata (45 fragrances linked).
• Dupes come only from the dupe brand's own statement of what inspired it: 2,850 statements from 6 dupe houses.
• We never use Fragrantica, Basenotes, Parfumo, community lists or scraped datasets.

02Freshness, retailer by retailer

Every price carries its date. A listing that has not appeared in its retailer's feed for three days is shown as not in stock and leaves the headline price. This table is live.

03Matching a listing to a fragrance

A retailer listing is matched to a catalog size by barcode (GTIN) when present, otherwise by brand, name, concentration and size. A name must match exactly after removing sizes and filler words: “Delina La Rosee” never matches “Delina”. Listings we cannot match with confidence wait in a review queue and never appear on a page.

04Measured error rates

We check our own work by hand and publish the result, including the misses.

05Sizes and price per ml

Milliliters written in the listing always win. When a listing gives only fluid ounces, we use the nominal size printed on US boxes: 1 oz is 30 ml, 1.7 oz is 50 ml, 2.5 oz is 75 ml, 3.4 oz is 100 ml, 4.2 oz is 125 ml, 6.8 oz is 200 ml. Other sizes are converted at 29.5735 ml per ounce and rounded. Price per ml is the price divided by that nominal size.

Testers, unboxed bottles, gift sets and minis are detected from the listing and kept apart. They are shown in their own section and never mixed into the headline price. The headline price is the lowest in-stock price for a new, boxed, full-size bottle across tracked US retailers that day. Sale prices count when the feed reports them. Shipping and tax are not included.

06The buy-or-wait verdict

• Still gathering history: fewer than 30 days of prices for that size. We never fill in history we did not observe.
• Low: today's price is at or below the 10th percentile of the last 90 days, or within 2% of the 90-day low.
• High: today's price is at least 10% above the 90-day median.
• Typical: anything in between.

The sentence under each verdict shows the numbers used, for example “$219 today vs $238 typical over 90 days.”

07Families and collections

A fragrance's family (Floral, Amber, Gourmand, Woody, Fresh, Musk, Oud & Leather, Aromatic) is computed from the notes its brand lists, with base notes weighted most. When a brand lists no notes, we use words in the fragrance's name, such as “Vanilla” or “Santal”, and the page says so. When neither tells us, we leave the family blank rather than guess. Every collection page prints the rule that decides what is in it.

08Dupes

An alternative appears only when its own brand states what inspired it on its own website. We quote that statement and link to it. We compare prices; we do not claim two fragrances smell the same.

09Images

Photographs appear only with a recorded license: a retailer's own feed image shown unaltered beside that retailer's link, a brand's press image used with permission, licensed stock, or photographs we take ourselves of bottles we bought. Everywhere else you see a bottle card we draw from the fragrance's listed notes and concentration. It is an illustration, never a photo of the real bottle.

10Authorized or discounter

Every price carries its retailer's label, and the ranking is always by price.

11What we don't know

• There are no live retailer prices yet. Prices will appear as each retailer approves our use of its official product feed; until then pages show the brand's list price.
• Some brands' websites do not allow automated reading, so their fragrance facts wait for retailer feeds. These include Dior, Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent, Giorgio Armani, Valentino, Prada, Versace, Gucci, Maison Francis Kurkdjian, Byredo, Kilian Paris, Maison Margiela, Lattafa and Billie Eilish.
• Jean Paul Gaultier, Rabanne, Penhaligon's and Carolina Herrera show their catalogs only through scripts in the browser, so their facts also wait for feeds.
• About 18% of fragrances listed on brand sites do not state a concentration (for example eau de parfum or eau de toilette), so we do not state one either.
• Prices do not include shipping or sales tax.
• In-store prices, member prices and coupon codes are not seen.
• A feed price can lag the retailer's own site by up to a day.
• For discount and marketplace sellers, we cannot verify where each bottle was sourced (grey market or not).

Found an error? Write to us from the contact page; corrections are published here.