Almost every fragrance sold anywhere carries one of four words on the box, and almost nobody is told what they mean. The short answer is that they describe how much perfume oil is dissolved in the alcohol. The longer answer is that no law anywhere requires a house to tell the truth about it.
The conventional ranges
The figures below are the ranges the industry has settled on by habit. They are widely published and broadly followed, and they are worth knowing. They are not standards, and no regulator enforces them.
| Eau de cologne | Roughly 2–5% perfume oil |
|---|---|
| Eau de toilette | Roughly 5–15% |
| Eau de parfum | Roughly 15–20% |
| Extrait de parfum | Roughly 20–40% |
A house may put "eau de parfum" on a bottle holding twelve per cent and break no rule. A house may put "eau de toilette" on something at eighteen per cent for no reason other than that the name suits the product. The word on the box is a marketing category that happens to correlate, loosely, with a measurement.
The percentage is not a quality score. It is a recipe decision, and a high one can be the wrong one.
Why more is not better
It is tempting to read the ladder as a quality ranking — cologne at the bottom, extrait at the top. It is not. Concentration determines how much material is in the bottle, not how good the material is. A twenty-five per cent extrait built on cheap synthetics is a worse object than a ten per cent eau de toilette built on real orris.
Concentration also changes the shape of a composition rather than simply its volume. Alcohol carries the volatile top notes outward; less alcohol means a fragrance that sits closer to the skin, opens more slowly, and lasts longer in a smaller radius. An extrait is not a loud eau de toilette. It is often a quieter one that stays for longer.
There are compositions that are ruined by being concentrated. A bright citrus structure at thirty per cent becomes syrupy and heavy; the lift that made it worth wearing depended on the alcohol. Houses that offer the same name in several strengths are not usually selling the same liquid at different dilutions — the formula is normally rebalanced for each.
What the number cannot tell you
Two things sit outside the percentage entirely, and both matter more.
The first is what the oil is made of. Natural materials are expensive, variable and often less powerful by weight than the synthetics that imitate them. A house that uses them needs more of them. A house that does not can reach the same stated percentage for a fraction of the cost. The number is identical; the bottles are not.
The second is maceration — how long the finished mixture is left to rest before it is bottled. A fresh blend and the same blend after two months in sealed steel are measurably different liquids, and the difference never appears on any label.
What Nagori states
Every edition here is an eau de parfum at 22%, which sits at the upper edge of the conventional band and into the lower end of what some houses would call extrait. The archive record on each product page carries the figure, the batch, and the number of weeks the batch macerated before bottling. Those three numbers together say more than the word on the box ever could.