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The perfume factories
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There are thirty major
parfumeries
in and around Grasse, most of them making not perfume but essences-plus-formulas which are then sold to Dior, LancA?me, EstA©e Lauder and the like, who make up their own brand-name perfumes. One litre of pure rose essence can cost as much as 125,000F/a?¬19,000; perfume contains twenty percent essence (eau de toilette and eau de Cologne considerably less). The major cost in this multi-billion-dollar business is marketing. The grand Parisian couturiers, whose clothes, on strictly cost-accounting grounds, serve simply to promote the perfume, go to inordinate lengths to sell their latest fragrance, spending hundreds of millions of francs a year on advertising alone.
The ingredients that the "nose" - as the creator of the perfume's formula is known - has to play with include resins, roots, moss, beans, bark, civet (extract of cat genitals), ambergris (intestinal goo from whales), bits of beaver and musk from Tibetan goats. If that hasn't put you off, you can visit the various
showrooms
, with overpoweringly fragrant shops and free guided tours, in English, of the traditional perfume factory set-up (the actual working industrial complexes are strictly out of bounds). These visits are free and usually open daily without interruption in summer; a few to choose from are
Fragonard
, 20 bd Fragonard;
Galimard
, 73 rte de Cannes; and
Molinard
at 60 bd Victor-Hugo (
www.molinard-parfums.com
). Other useful information
for tourists (each section contains more specific sub-sections): |
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France,
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