How to Best Preserve your Perfume (Professional Tips by Perfumer Guy Robert)

"When someone offers you a perfume, may you be lucky enough to receive a true parfum (instead of an eau) in a beautiful, large bottle. Chances are you will fall in love with it, and that you will want to replace it at some point. A valuable advice, in that case, is to purchase the smaller size. Depending on your perfume habits, a "half ounce" or "one ounce" will suffice. Larger volumes will obviously take many more months to finish; but while a well-made perfume can stand the test of time, age doesn't give it any interesting qualities either.

via lusciouslife pin

Once you have opened the bottle, a light oxidation process takes place inside. If you forget to close the bottle after you have used the perfume, this will only speed up the process. The fresh, fleeting top notes of the fragrance will tend to "calm down" a bit; it's true that this will not completely ruin the fragrance, but it will change the initial impression you get from your perfume.

When the natural ingredients are derived from such noble raw materials as jasmine, orange blossom, jonquil, and rose, the color will become slightly browner. Depending on the composition of the perfume, it can develop into a brownish-red within a few years. If it has a green tint, that green may become darker. This is normal, and it does not necessarily mean that the fragrance is deteriorated.

However, when you purchase a new bottle of the same perfume, you may get the impression that they sold you a lighter, more fleeting fragrance. This phenomenon causes many customers to take their new bottle back to the store, claiming it is not the same; hence, manufacturers are asked on a regular basis to analyze and check recently purchased bottles in their laboratories.

The aging process is increased when you add light and heat. Don't keep your perfume on the bathroom shelve, which is often located near a radiator: your interior decorator may say it looks fabulous, but it's really the wrong place for perfumes. If, on top of that, you expose the bottle to direct sunlight, you have done all you can to kill the fragrance. Remember that the sun is a perfume's greatest enemy."

The above fragrance advice "how to" comes from a free translation of legendary perfumer's Guy Robert's "Le Sens du Parfum" French book (out of print now) courtesy of SoCalWoman/MUA. Robert is responsible for lots of fragrance classics, such as Madame Rochas, Dior Dioressence, Equipage,Caleche and Doblis by Hermes, Amouage Gold etc.

 If you're new to perfume and want more practical "how to" guides on fragrances, please refer to our "HOW TO GUIDES" articles on the right hand column (scroll) of the Home Page. If you want the most popular questions answered, please refer to the relevant frequent questions on perfumes link. If you want to submit a new question which may appear on the blog and get answered by me to the best of my ability, please email me using Contact.