Givenchy L'Interdit: which bottle are you actually buying?
Twelve different bottles are sold as L'Interdit in the UK. Three of them cost £47.99 and none of the three is the same perfume. Here is how to tell them apart.
Three different bottles of Givenchy L'Interdit cost £47.99 in the UK right now. A 35 ml eau de parfum, a 35 ml eau de parfum intense, and a 50 ml eau de toilette. Same name on the box, same price at the till, three different products.
We track twelve L'Interdit bottles. Five of them are 35 ml.
The five 35 ml bottles
At the same size, in ascending price: hair mist £29.40, eau de toilette £47.20, eau de parfum £47.99, eau de parfum intense £47.99, and parfum £62.35.
Live price check: see the current best price and full recorded history.
Live price check: see the current best price and full recorded history.
That is almost £33 between bottles that look nearly identical in a search result. The listing title is often the only thing separating them, and it is frequently truncated.
The cheapest L'Interdit is not perfume
The hair mist is the lowest price of the twelve, which makes it the top result on any page sorted by price.
Live price check: see the current best price and full recorded history.
It is a hair product. Lighter, alcohol-reduced so it does not dry your hair out, and not meant to do the job of the eau de parfum. It is a perfectly good thing to own. It is not the thing you meant to buy when you searched for L'Interdit, and at 84p a millilitre it is not even cheap for what it is.
Same money, different bottle
The £47.99 collision is the interesting one. At that price you can have 35 ml of the eau de parfum or 50 ml of the eau de toilette.
Live price check: see the current best price and full recorded history.
Fifteen extra millilitres against a stronger, longer lasting version of the same scent. There is no correct answer, but there is a wrong way to arrive at one, which is not realising you were choosing.
Intense and parfum do not mean anything fixed
Concentration names are not regulated. Eau de toilette generally carries less fragrance oil than eau de parfum, and that much holds across brands. Everything above eau de parfum is the brand's own naming.
Givenchy's L'Interdit ladder runs eau de toilette, eau de parfum, eau de parfum intense, then parfum. Another house might use "extrait", "elixir" or "absolu" at a completely different strength. Do not assume the word that sounds strongest is strongest, or that a higher price means a higher concentration. On L'Interdit at 35 ml, the intense and the standard eau de parfum are currently the same money.
Stronger is not automatically better either. The eau de toilette is the one to buy if you want it to sit close to the skin in July.
Before you pay
Read the retailer's own product title in full, not the search snippet. Check the concentration and the millilitres both appear. If the page says one thing and the bottle image says another, believe neither until the retailer fixes it.
Then compare that exact bottle across shops, rather than comparing whatever each shop happened to put on its L'Interdit page. Every page here covers one concentration in one size, which is the only way the comparison means anything: start with the 50 ml eau de parfum and switch size or strength from there. The same trap turns up on most big fragrance lines, and the general version of these checks covers it.
Prices here come from our own reads of retailer pages and change as those pages change.