Going With The Flow: The Most Expensive Liquids

Perfume: Chanel No. 5; Bottled Water: at expensive bar; Gasoline: Canadian average as of May 1,2007 (Various sources)

Going with the flow

The most expensive liquids

Last Updated May 14, 2007

CBC News

What is the most expensive commonly-used or well known liquid? It depends. Comparing the crude price per litre of one substance over another can seem a bit like trying to equate chalk and cheese. But CBC News Online has tried to rank some of the most commonly used liquids in Canadian life by listing what we might pay for them if we bought a standard-sized flagon at the corner supermarket, pharmacy or chemical plant. As you can see from the graph above, two of the three most costly liquids are luxury items that are defined — and made more attractive to consumers — by their high prices. It's no surprise either that good old tap water is far and away the cheapest thing we consume.

1. Perfume

Mohammed Al Fayed, the owner of Harrods in London, displays a bottle of what's thought to be the world's most expensive perfume. At $256,000 for a half litre, the special edition Clive Christian perfume costs much more than 20 times as much as Chanel No. 5. (San Tang/Associated Press)

At first glance, or perhaps first sniff, the special edition Clive Christian perfume unveiled at Harrods in London recently appears to be the most expensive liquid in the world. A half-litre bottle retails for $256,000, or about $512 per ml. But subtract the cost of the five-carat diamond embedded in the stopper, the 18-carat gold inlay and the Czech crystal decanter, and you end up with perfume that's only slightly more expensive than a top-of-the-line household name like Chanel No. 5 (which costs about $2,816 a litre, if you ever feel inclined to buy that much). Even so, perfume has to be considered the planet's most expensive everyday liquid. Marketing, product development and packaging — not the perfume itself — make up more than 99 per cent of the cost of a bottle of scent.

2. Printer ink

It's pretty much conventional wisdom that computer printer companies make their money from selling expensive ink and toner cartridges, not the printers. Never mind that the chemical composition of black ink isn't all that different from what the Chinese invented thousands of years ago, putting a few dribbles of it into an elaborate plastic cartridge can cost the buyer upward of $60. (It can cost much more if the powder in laser printer cartridges is considered the same as ink. It's not, but it has the same effect in the printing process.) One technology writer recently estimated that filling an Olympic swimming pool with name brand printer ink at the standard retail price would cost you a cool $6.5 billion. No wonder more and more of us are opting for refilled cartridges and generic branded toner.

3. Champagne

Expect to pay around $600 for a litre of the best bubbly at a provincial liquor commission. But why, you might ask. Well, the strain of Pinot Noir grape that morphs like magic into fizzy wine from France is rather expensive. So is land in the Champagne region, east of Paris around the ancient city of Rheims. But the main reason that champagne is so costly is that people are prepared to pay a small fortune for a few glasses of fermented grape juice suffused with bubbles of carbon dioxide. That expensive bottle from your local liquor store works out to about $13 a sip, depending on how deeply you slurp.

4. Nasal spray

A recent survey by gasoline retailers in the United States, who admittedly were trying to show how their product wasn't as expensive as people thought, found that a certain type of prescription nasal spray had a retail price of nearly $600 a litre — which is about the amount that a family might use over several generations if all of them suffered from the sniffles on a regular basis. Pharmaceutical companies say their high prices for proprietorial drugs represent the huge costs of research, development and marketing — not the raw materials.

5. Blood

Saving a life shouldn't have a cost ceiling — but someone has to pay for blood. In Canada, it's the health-care system. In some other places, patients or their insurance companies pay directly for every unit used. People who donate blood for money often receive very little. Villagers in China, for example, often receive the equivalent of $5 Cdn or less per litre. Paid plasma donation clinics in the United States give their donors between $20 and $30 U.S. By the time blood is given to patients in hospital, the actual cost per unit is at least $300 Cdn or much more if administrative and other costs are factored in.

6. Water

The more exclusive the bar, the costlier the designer water. These are specially developed brands for a tiny 'water café' in the town of Chappaqua, N.Y. (Frank Franklin II/Associated Press)

If it comes in a fancy bottle, water can be costly. In some outrageously expensive bars, you can pay $75 for a litre of something fizzy and European. In the supermarket, it's more like $1. But even store-bought water is often more expensive than pop, which is largely made from water. The reason? The costs of marketing and transport. At any one time in the European Union, for example, there are more trucks on the road carrying bottled water to market than any other product. Putting a price on water is also complicated by the huge environmental cost of bottling it in plastic, and the gas and diesel burned as it's carried to consumers. As for what comes out of your tap, it's by far the cheapest thing we have to drink, at less than a tenth of a cent per litre in most Canadian municipalities.

7. Maple Syrup

Many parents have warned their kids to "go easy" on the syrup during a pancake breakfast because "it's real" — read, "expensive." Maple syrup is costly because it can only be produced for a few weeks in late winter and early spring, and is hugely dependent on a narrow set of weather conditions. Also, producing syrup requires vast quantities of maple sap — about 40 litres of sap for a single litre of syrup. The cost of that litre varies widely but is at least $15 and often a lot more. And that means parents are likely to continue being as stingy with the syrup as they were a generation ago.

Maple sap drips from a spigot. It takes forty litres of sap to produce a single litre of syrup. It's one of the more expensive liquids in the average kitchen. (Joel Philippsen/AP/Harold-Press)

8. Soda pop

There's a huge variation in the price of sweet fizzy drinks. Name brands cost more than generics. Cheap pop is often used to lure consumers into supermarkets and restaurants, making it by far one of the cheapest liquids that we regularly purchase. However restaurants and cinemas manage to make us pay relatively high prices for something they buy for very little. Health campaigners and environmentalists say the vast amount of soda pop we consume — on average, about 230 litres each year — has many hidden costs that jack up the real price of a cola or a root beer. Diabetes, dental decay and landfills bulging with cans and plastic bottles all have to be paid for.

9. Gasoline

It's safe to say that most adult Canadians can quote the price of a litre of gas. About a third of the price on the gas station sign goes to taxes. Most of the rest covers the costs of crude oil, refining and transport. Despite perceptions to the contrary, gasoline is not a hugely expensive liquid in Canada. It's actually rather cheap, if you exclude the cost of carbon dioxide and other emissions from the tailpipe of your vehicle. However, many petroleum experts agree with the most radical environmentalists on one thing — gas prices can only go up, as supplies decline and governments look for ways to pay for programs to mitigate climate change.

10. Liquid nitrogen

This is a liquid that few of us will ever see or experience, largely because nitrogen gas becomes liquid at temperatures below 195 degrees C. Yet it's a substance in wide use in industry and science. Liquid nitrogen freezes most other liquids instantly, making it useful for the transport of blood and other biological materials. Research is being done into whether nitrogen might be used as fuel to generate electricity or power vehicles but for the moment, the production of the gas requires more energy than it might produce. Liquid nitrogen is also difficult to transport over long distances because it must be kept very cold, so the further from its source, the more it costs.