EDT vs EDP vs Parfum: The Ranges Overlap at 15%

By Mahdi MST · Updated 2026-09-17 · 8 min read

The label is not a measurement. There is no regulator that audits what goes in a bottle marked eau de parfum, and no legal floor a brand has to clear before printing it. The percentages usually quoted are market convention, which is why two retailers can publish slightly different numbers for the same word and both be right.

So the useful question is not what the categories mean. It is how much of your money the category is actually buying, and whether the bottle you are holding sits at the top of its range or the bottom. On that, the published figures and the wear votes disagree in an interesting way.

What do EDT, EDP and parfum actually mean?

EDT, EDP and parfum are declarations of how much fragrance oil is dissolved in the alcohol, running from about 1% at the weakest to about 30% at the strongest. Ulta Beauty's published guide puts extrait de parfum at 20-30%, eau de parfum at around 15-20%, eau de toilette at 5-15%, eau de cologne at 2-5%, and eau fraiche at around 1-3%.

Everything else people attach to those words is inference. Nothing in the label tells you which notes were used, how good the materials were, or how the bottle will behave after four hours. It is a dilution figure, printed by the brand, in a category nobody polices.

Which is worth saying plainly before the table below gets treated as a ranking. A 15% eau de toilette and a 15% eau de parfum hold the same amount of oil. One of them just costs more.

Houses describe the same ladder in their own words: Chanel's fragrance FAQ is one of the few that publishes an explanation customers can read.

How much oil is in each concentration?

Ulta Beauty's published concentration ranges, checked on 12 September 2026, are in the table below, with the wear figures those sources attach to them.

The eau de toilette wear figure of 3-4 hours comes from Skylar's concentration guide rather than Ulta, which does not give one. Skylar's oil ranges for the two middle categories match Ulta's exactly, so the two agree on substance and differ only on what they bothered to publish.

Two things the table does not carry. It gives no percentage for any individual bottle, because brands do not publish one, and its wear figures are the retailers' estimates rather than measurements taken on skin. Treat the hours as the shape of the claim, not as a countdown.

Are the concentration bands the same size?

The concentration bands are not the same size, and the widest band is the one most bottles are sold in: eau de toilette spans ten points of oil at 5-15%, extrait spans ten at 20-30%, and eau de parfum spans only five at 15-20%.

That makes eau de parfum the most predictable label on a shelf. A bottle marked eau de parfum sits somewhere inside a five-point window, so the category tells you roughly what you are getting. Eau de toilette tells you much less, because the top of its range holds three times the oil of the bottom.

So the label is not equally informative across the categories. It is a fairly tight claim on an eau de parfum and a loose one on an eau de toilette, which is worth remembering when the two sit side by side at different prices.

How often is a concentration even stated?

Most fragrances never tell you which rung of the ladder they sit on.

Of 107,044 fragrances in the Accord Twin corpus, only 12,457 state a concentration at all, which is about one in nine. Among those that do:

Eau de toilette and eau de parfum are effectively tied, and the remaining half is spread across formats that are not on the ladder at all. So the tidy three-step hierarchy describes a minority of what is actually sold.

Do the concentration ranges overlap?

The concentration ranges do overlap: eau de toilette runs to 15% and eau de parfum starts at 15%, and that is the most useful fact on this page. Both sources we checked draw the boundary at the same number from opposite sides, which means the categories touch rather than stack.

The practical effect is that the strongest eau de toilette on a shelf can hold more oil than the weakest eau de parfum beside it. The label sorts bottles into buckets that genuinely differ on average while saying almost nothing reliable about any individual bottle.

And brands do not publish where inside the range a given bottle sits. You can find the concentration word on the box. You cannot find the percentage, which is the number that would actually answer your question.

Does an EDP really last longer than an EDT?

An EDP does last longer than an EDT on average, but by much less than the price difference implies. Accord Twin's corpus holds 107,044 bottle records; 1,052 of them carry both a concentration we could read from the label and enough community wear votes to score. Across those, the share of votes calling the wear long lasting or eternal runs: extrait 69.9%, eau de parfum 58.2%, eau de toilette 44.4%, eau de cologne 31.8%, eau fraiche 29.2%.

The ladder is real and it points the way the marketing says. But look at the eau de toilette figure again. Nearly half the votes on eau de toilette bottles still say long lasting.

Stepping up from eau de toilette to eau de parfum improves your odds by 13.8 points. It does not move you from a no to a yes, and no concentration in the set clears 70%.

The underlying measurement is evaporation. Schwarzenbach and Bertschi of Givaudan sampled the air above treated skin in 2001 and watched the concentration fall away over several hours.

How much longer, in practice?

The full vote distribution is more honest than any single average, so here it is across the five buckets voters choose from. For eau de toilette: 8.3% very weak, 12.3% weak, 35.1% moderate, 31.4% long lasting, 13.0% eternal. For eau de parfum: 6.7%, 8.1%, 26.9%, 38.2%, 20.0%.

Most of the gain is not at the top. It comes from eau de parfum draining the moderate bucket, which falls from 35.1% to 26.9%, and moving those votes one rung up. The eternal share only rises from 13.0% to 20.0%.

Extrait is where the shape genuinely changes: 47.5% of its votes land on eternal, more than double eau de parfum. If all-day wear is the thing you are buying, that is the jump that delivers it, and it is also the jump that costs the most.

Why do two bottles of the same concentration wear differently?

Two bottles of the same concentration wear differently because the concentration sets the oil load and the notes decide what happens to it, and the label describes only the first of those. A heavy base of amber or vanilla tends to linger even at a low concentration, while a top-heavy citrus and aromatic build tends to fade sooner even at a high one.

The spread inside each category is wide enough to swamp the gap between categories. Eau de toilette bottles in the checked set draw votes across all five wear buckets, from very weak to eternal, which is what makes an average a weak predictor for the bottle in your hand.

This is where the note list earns its keep over the label. A bottle's family and its base notes will tell you more about staying power than the three letters on the box, and the ranking by hours shows the spread on the Accord Twin list.

Is parfum worth the price jump?

Parfum is sometimes worth the price jump, and the wear votes say the jump is real rather than imaginary: extrait reaches 69.9% long-or-eternal against 58.2% for eau de parfum, with 47.5% of extrait votes on the top rung alone. That is the biggest single step in the whole ladder.

But extrait is also the smallest sample in the checked set, at 106 bottles and 1,599 votes against 424 bottles and 29,949 votes for eau de parfum. The direction is clear; the precision is not. Treat 69.9% as a strong signal rather than a measured constant.

The cheaper move is usually the smaller bottle. Extrait is often sold in smaller bottles than 100 ml, so the sticker gap can overstate the cost per wear, and a decant settles the question for a small fraction of that. The same logic runs through the niche and designer split, where the label on the box again does less work than the note list underneath it.

What do cologne and eau fraiche mean on a label?

Eau de cologne and eau fraiche are the two weakest categories, at 2-5% and around 1-3% oil respectively, and in the checked votes they behave accordingly: eau de cologne draws 31.8% long-or-eternal, eau fraiche 29.2%.

Eau de cologne is the odd one in the data. A third of its votes, 32.3%, land on very weak, the highest share of any category by a wide margin, which fits a format built for splashing generously rather than wearing sparingly.

Note also that cologne means two different things. On a European label it is this concentration. In American usage it often just means a fragrance marketed to men, at any concentration at all, which is why a bottle called a cologne can be an eau de parfum on the box.

Which concentration should you buy?

Buy on the notes and the wear figure for the specific bottle, not on the category, because the category only shifts your odds by roughly 14 points per step. If a bottle you like comes in both, the eau de parfum is the better bet on average and the eau de toilette is not the mistake the price gap suggests. How you apply and store a bottle matters too, and the guide to making perfume last longer weighs the usual advice against the research.

Two cases where the label should decide it. If you want a scent that is gone by lunch, deliberately, eau de toilette and eau fraiche are built for it. If you want one application to survive a working day, extrait is the only category in the checked set where the top wear rung is the single most common vote.

Everything in between is a note question wearing a concentration costume.

What can this data not tell you?

The wear-vote data cannot speak for most bottles: only 1,052 of 107,044 corpus records carry both a readable concentration and scoreable wear votes, which is about 1% of the set. Concentration is recorded on roughly a tenth of records, so the rest was read from bottle names, and any bottle whose name omits the format is missing from these figures entirely.

The wear votes are also community opinion, not measurement. They are large in aggregate, nearly 55,000 votes across the five categories, and they are not a stopwatch on a wrist.

Accord Twin has not smelled any of these bottles. Everything above is published ranges from named retailers, checked on 12 September 2026, and community wear votes from the corpus. Prices and formulations move, and if a figure here disagrees with what the bottle in front of you says, trust the bottle.