“The expensive sneaker was yesterday, now it has to be the expensive perfume.”

WYour luxury is not always apparent straight away. It's in an inconspicuous brown glass bottle at the Lengling perfume factory in Munich: Oud, a fragrance that gives perfume the touch of “A Thousand and One Nights”. A raw material so valuable that it can almost be worth its weight in gold. A kilogram costs a good 50,000 euros, which makes the essence one of the most expensive in the world – and a symbol of an industry that even the ongoing economic crisis has little impact on. On the contrary: the fragrance business is developing better than ever. Germans spent almost two billion euros last year, a record figure and twice as much as in 2009.