The Naked Perfumer by Melanie Jane

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The World’s Priciest Perfumes: Because Your Wallet Should Suffer for Your Scent

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  • Perfum VI by Gianni Vive Sulman – $89,000: Fun fact: Michael Jackson’s favorite. If that doesn’t scream “buy me,” I don’t know what will.

  • Clive Christian No.1 Majesté Impériale – $215,000: This bottle’s so rare only ten exist, complete with 18-carat gold and a 5-carat diamond. Who cares what it smells like at that point?

  • Opera Prima by Bulgari – $235,000: You’ll probably forget what it smells like because you’ll be too busy gawking at the 250 carats of citrine and 25 carats of diamonds encrusting the bottle.

  • Golden Delicious by DKNY – $1 million: Took a team of jewelers 1,500 hours to bedazzle the bottle with 2,909 precious stones. For a fragrance that sounds more like a supermarket apple, it’s certainly aiming high.

  • Shumukh by Nabeel – $1.5 million: It’s a perfume bottle, sure, but it’s also covered in 3,500 diamonds. Oh, and it’s remote-controlled. Because spraying yourself manually is so last century.

And on it goes with others like Paco Rabanne's 1 Million Luxe Edition or Baccarat’s Les Larmes Sacrées de Thebes. Because nothing says luxury like dousing yourself in a mortgage payment. 

Let’s  take a deeper dive into the most expensive one:

So, picture this: you’ve just bought a perfume that costs a casual $1.5 million. Yes, that’s million—because clearly, nothing says "I'm loaded" quite like spraying liquid wealth on yourself. And let’s be honest, the fragrance could smell like a gas station toilet, but when you slap a price tag like that on the box, it’s suddenly “sophisticated.”

Now, this isn’t just any perfume, oh no. This is Shumukh, a monument to opulence born straight out of Dubai, where “understated” is a word they use to describe a gold-plated Rolls Royce. The bottle stands taller than your average toddler at 1.97 meters—so if you ever wanted to intimidate small children with a perfume bottle, here’s your chance.

And the bottle? Well, it's got a bit of sparkle... 3,500 diamonds, just in case you weren’t clear on how serious we are about you being better than everyone else. They’ve also thrown in some topaz and pearls for good measure because why not? Oh, and it's made of 18-karat gold. You know, because nothing pairs better with your outfit than a bottle you could probably trade for a house.

The scent itself? It took over three years and 494 attempts to perfect. Yeah, it’s one of those things where you have to pretend you can actually smell all these rare ingredients like Indian agarwood and Turkish rose. But let's face it, at this price, you’ll just spritz and nod along like, "Mmm, yes, definitely catching that rare wood vibe.” Never mind that the fragrance could last on your skin for over 12 hours—which is convenient, because after blowing a million on it, you’ll want to make sure people are smelling your success from the next postcode.

In short, it’s not just a perfume. It’s a statement. That statement is: “I’ve got more money than sense.”