Quote:
Originally Posted by
d4N13L 
I always though that too. Means that it contains 20% of parfum? Or 20% of Parfum + water?
The 20% that isnt alcohol could be potentially anything - in many cases it will be mostly water, but in a very expensive EDP it might all be fragrance materials. Even within the fragrance concentrate though, not everything actually has a smell because some of it is solvents used to get the aromatics into liquid form. Often there may be additional solvent added for no other reason than to bring down the alcohol content too - things like
IPM or
DPG might be used rather than water in order to avoid the risk of the fragrance becoming cloudy at low temperature.
In general the less aromatic ingredients there are in a fragrance, the more water you can add before you get solubility problems and vice-versa.
There is however a practical
maximum on the alcohol content, resulting from the fact that alcohol forms, what is called an
azeotrope with water that means it is in practice never more than 95.6% - and then you have to add the perfume - so its impossible to have a fragrance that contains more than about 90% ethanol (alcohol) by the time youve added the perfume and necessary solvents.
The alcohol content is not a useful guide to the strength of the perfume only to how much tax is payable on it and whether it is safe to post.
