The Monthly · No. 03 · 24 September 2026
Four categories from the same protocol, spanning the loudest and the quietest price responses of the series, and one category that was measured but doesn't appear, on purpose.
Categories in this issue
| Category | Cuts | Increases |
|---|---|---|
| Women's fragrances | 1.11[0.97 to 1.25] | 0.93[0.77 to 1.10] |
| Men's fragrances | 1.00[0.82 to 1.20] | 0.78[0.61 to 0.97] |
| Beard oils | 0.51[0.22 to 0.86] | 0.21[−0.22 to 0.57] |
| Hand soaps | 0.19[0.03 to 0.47] | 0.24[0.08 to 0.42] |
Four categories, ranked by how much a discount buys
The Pattern
September spans the whole dynamic range of this series in one month. Fragrances sit at the loud end: women's at 1.11, the strongest cut response measured so far, men's at 1.00 with the first segment order to survive a band check. Beard oils and hand soaps sit at the quiet end, where hand soaps respond at roughly a fifth of the fragrance rate and beard oils leave a whole direction undemonstrated. Both fragrance sets separate demonstrably from hand soaps in both directions, and women's fragrances separate from beard oils on the cut side; the two quiet categories overlap each other.
August ended with a hypothesis: what stays on the skin answers price, what rinses off doesn't. September half-confirms it. Fragrances, the ultimate leave-on, are the loudest categories yet, and hand soaps, the ultimate rinse-off, are the quietest. But beard oils spoil the clean story: they stay on the skin all day and still barely answer. What the loud and quiet ends actually share is market temperature: fragrances saw 145 entrants in 24 months and same-day price moves on six cuts in ten, while the two niches answer in five days and admit a handful of newcomers a year. Whether price sensitivity follows the product or the crowd is now the open question of this series.
As usual: four more categories refine a pattern, they don't settle one. The Q3 Quarterly will put all twelve on one axis.
Next
The Q3 Quarterly puts all twelve categories on one axis: gated PDF, mid-October. Q4 categories are being selected now; reply with a category you want measured.
Corrected on 14 October 2026: women's fragrances, price cuts, lower bound 0.97 (was shown as 0.96 due to rounding).
The Monthly
Each weekly report measures a single category. The Monthly is where they get compared. One subscription: The Monthly every month and the Quarterly every three months.