Perfume Minis

Airborne Meaning

There was a time—a couple of years ago—when I began for some inexplicable reason (a perceived humdrumness in my life?) to order mini bottles of perfume online. They didn’t cost much—a few bucks each, depending on their age (ie their vintage, to use the more lofty word), their rarity and their pedigree.

Once they began coming in the mail, these delightful little jewel-like bottles with their sometimes historic contents, it became difficult to stop collecting them. Malgorzata now has twenty-three of them so far on her dressing table, all resting on a delicate Limoges platter we bought on which to display them.

The bottles are very (exquisitly) small and ingratiatingly delicate. Most contain about 1.7ml of perfume, though we do have a few bigger ones that hold as much as 5ml.

Some of them are antique, and you can’t always be certain that the contents will still be fresh or even controllable (the tiny bottle of Oleg Cassini perfume—the dark reddish one at the lower left in the photograph below—hasn’t been manufactured since 1990, and we think ours is actually much older than that). An old perfume is probably not something you’d really want to wear, or even uncork, unless the bottle had always been—and still was—tightly sealed.

But it’s just sort of pleasurable to gaze upon them (it’s increasingly a guilty, slightly embarrassing pleasure now, given how remote the high-end perume experience is from my accelerating socialist convictions). These tiny bottles are saved remnants from an increasinglly unworkable past. They’re mini-sculptures. And nano-extravagances, distant evocations of some ostensibly glamourous era in which one’s scent entered a room before its wearer.

Some of the perfumes come already partially used, and of course once there is air in the bottle, the perfume begins to evaporate—though, admittedly, this can take a very long time. We once bought a little bottle of the aptly-named Extravagance by Givenchy, which had got broken in shipping and had leaked out onto the packing material, leaving only a very small amount of the fragrance in the bottom of the bottle.

The seller kindly sent us a replacement bottle, and I put the leaky one on a shelf in the bathroom medicine cabinet. There, it continued to smell fresh and delicious for most of the year, and even now—empty—if you pick it up and give it time, that residual, insinuatingly innocent, light-flowery, Audrey-Hepburning Givenchy fragrance can still lift your heart. I’m beginning to think there must be something to all that aromatherapy stuff.

Some of the perfumes on the tray are by Oleg Cassini, Guerlain (Imperiale), Givenchy (Extravagance), Lancome (Tressor), Jean Patou (Sublime), Chanel (Coco) and…well, almost the whole haute gang is reptsented on our little tray. There’s even a sinister, rotund, characteristically swaggering bottle in black glass from Salvador Dali. I do sort wish we had a bottle of Elsa Schiaparelli’s perfume Shocking (from 1937). I always liked Schiaparelli’s stuff.

Anyhow it’s all effluvia from another world.