The small bottle is usually the expensive one
A 15 ml Lady Million costs more than the 30 ml. Across the bottles we track, price per millilitre falls hard with size, and the travel size is the worst buy on the shelf.
The 15 ml bottle of Paco Rabanne Lady Million costs more than the 30 ml bottle. Not more per millilitre. More money, for half as much perfume.
Live price check: see the current best price and full recorded history.
Live price check: see the current best price and full recorded history.
£41.99 against £39.95 when we checked. The small one is a handbag size sold on convenience, and it is priced accordingly. Nobody puts the two next to each other on a product page, so nobody notices.
That is the extreme case. The ordinary case is almost as bad.
Twice the perfume for £2.50
Michael Kors Sexy Amber runs £24.99 at 50 ml and £27.49 at 100 ml. Double the bottle for a tenth more money.
Live price check: see the current best price and full recorded history.
Live price check: see the current best price and full recorded history.
Anyone buying the 50 ml here is paying 50p a millilitre instead of 27p. If you will ever finish the bottle, the smaller one is simply worse.
The ladder, in full
Marc Jacobs Daisy is sold in four sizes and shows the pattern cleanly. £29.99 at 30 ml, £37.99 at 50 ml, £50.90 at 100 ml, £75.95 at 200 ml.
Live price check: see the current best price and full recorded history.
Live price check: see the current best price and full recorded history.
Per millilitre that is £1.00, 76p, 51p and 38p. The largest bottle is under 40% the unit price of the smallest, for the identical liquid.
Versace Eros Flame is worse at the bottom end. The 10 ml works out at £1.92 a millilitre and the 100 ml at 74p.
Live price check: see the current best price and full recorded history.
Live price check: see the current best price and full recorded history.
But bigger is not a rule
Viktor & Rolf Spicebomb breaks it. The 90 ml works out at 49p a millilitre and the 150 ml at 58p, so the giant bottle is the worse deal today.
Live price check: see the current best price and full recorded history.
Live price check: see the current best price and full recorded history.
This happens because unit price is set by competition, not by volume. The sizes retailers fight over get cut hardest, and that is usually the popular middle size rather than the biggest one. Where only one or two shops stock the 150 ml, there is nothing forcing the price down.
Which is why the sum beats the rule of thumb. Work out the price per millilitre at every size on the page before you pick one.
When the small bottle is still right
If you are not sure you like it, buy small and accept the premium. You are paying for the option to be wrong, which is a reasonable thing to buy.
Fragrance does not keep forever either. An opened bottle sitting in a warm bathroom for five years will not smell the way it did. If a 200 ml would take you a decade to finish, the per millilitre figure is theoretical.
Everyone else should do the sum.
The ten second version
Divide the price by the millilitres. Do it for every size on the page, not just the one you had in mind. Then compare that number across shops rather than comparing the headline price.
Each fragrance page here lists every size we track, so you can step through them without hunting round a retailer's site, and how to compare perfume prices properly covers the rest of the checks. The numbers above come from our own reads of retailer product pages and move when those prices move.