He also points out that, despite the fact that perfume companies come out with new products every year, the ingredients remain largely unchanged and still include many substances identified in Biblical perfume recipes.
Surprisingly, the luxury-goods business is having a strong year, largely thanks to demand in China, the Gulf and other emerging economies. (Indeed, things have been so good that perfume-makers face a new product-liability problem in Russia, where oligarchs' girlfriends buy dozens of bottles in order to bathe in a fragrance, unaware that this can be deadly.) Japan, which experienced similar excesses in the 1980s, still accounts for around a quarter of global luxury-goods sales.