You've seen the words on a bottle — eau de toilette, eau de parfum, extrait — and perhaps assumed they were marketing flourishes. They're not. They describe the single most important number in perfumery: how much actual perfume is in your perfume.
The concentration ladder
Every fragrance is essentially two things: aromatic materials (naturals like jasmine absolute and sandalwood, plus aroma molecules) dissolved in perfumer's alcohol. The ratio between them defines what you're buying:
Eau de toilette (EDT) sits around 5–15% aromatic materials. Light, breezy, gone by lunchtime. Most designer fragrances for men live here.
Eau de parfum (EDP) runs roughly 15–20%. The modern standard — more presence, four to six hours of life on skin.
Extrait de parfum (also called parfum or pure perfume) is the top of the ladder: typically 20–40% aromatic materials. This is the oldest and most concentrated form of fragrance — the way perfume was worn before the twentieth century diluted it for mass production.
Every Neshama fragrance is an extrait, blended at 20% concentration.
What concentration actually changes
More concentration doesn't simply mean "stronger." It changes the character of a scent in three ways.
It wears closer, and longer. An extrait doesn't shout across a room the way a high-projection EDP can. It sits nearer the skin and unfolds slowly — eight, ten, twelve hours, sometimes still whispering the next morning. Perfumers call this a scent that "wears intimate." Others discover it when they lean in.
The base notes get room to speak. In a light concentration, the volatile top notes — citrus, spice — do most of the talking before the scent fades. In an extrait, the heavier materials (oud, sandalwood, oakmoss, resins, animalic notes) have the density to fully develop. That long, evolving drydown is where the story of a perfume is really told.
Naturals behave differently. Natural materials are complex — a single jasmine absolute contains hundreds of aromatic compounds, and it smells different in hour one than in hour six. At higher concentrations, that complexity becomes the texture of the scent itself. This is why we build our perfumes around unusually high proportions of natural materials: Lebanese gardenia enfleurage in Wandering Stars, Thai osmanthus absolute and Egyptian jasmine in Souls on Fire, real oud and New Caledonian sandalwood in Ninth Wave, tobacco absolute in Jasmine & Tobacco.
Why extraits cost more — and why they often cost less
There's no way around it: natural absolutes and genuine oud are among the most expensive raw materials on earth, and an extrait uses two to four times more of them than an EDP. That's the honest reason a hand-blended extrait costs more than a designer bottle.
But the arithmetic is friendlier than it looks. You wear less of an extrait — two dabs rather than six sprays — and it lasts most of a day. Bottle for bottle, many extrait wearers find their fragrance spending goes down, because one bottle lasts a year or more and gets shelved less due to boredom.
How to wear an extrait
Apply it to warm points where skin is thin — inner wrists, the base of the throat, behind the ears. Don't rub; it bruises the top notes. Then give it time. An extrait is not an instant scent but a slow reveal: what you smell at first application is the overture, not the opera.
Try before you commit
Concentration is something you have to feel on your own skin — no description substitutes for it. Our [Discovery Set](/products/sample-pack) includes all four Neshama extraits in 1.5ml vials for £20, and comes with a £20 voucher toward any full bottle. If one of them becomes yours, the set has cost you nothing.
*Every Neshama perfume is an extrait de parfum, compounded and bottled by hand in small batches in London by perfumer Simon Shaer.