What Do You Do with a Perfume Bottle That’s Gone Off? – Undina’s Looking Glass

With Halloween just behind us, it feels fitting to bring up something genuinely scary for any perfume lover: discovering that a bottle of a favorite perfume has gone off. It doesn’t happen often with bottles, and mostly we deal with evaporating decants and spoiled samples, but when it does, we’re left deciding what to do with it.

Saturday Question #282:

What Do You Do with a Perfume Bottle That’s Gone Off?

Do you throw it away? Save somewhere? Keep on your shelf?

A bonus question: what was the last perfume that you discovered spoiled in your collection?

My Answer

After our discussion about Italian perfumes in our collections two weeks ago, I felt an urge to wear Prada‘s Infusion d’Iris (EdP), which I hadn’t reached for yet this year. I took the bottle out of its box, did a “control spray” into the sink (sometimes it helps to “clean out” some aged juice from the spraying mechanism), and then carelessly aimed the next portion at my wrist… Luckily for me, it hadn’t become rancid or really unpleasant. But it completely lost the opening citrus, I’m not sure I smell any iris, and even galbanum seems quite muted. My sink was treated to a couple more sprays, after which I applied more perfume to different parts of my body. With the same result. It gets more recognizable two hours into development, but overall, it is not the perfume I fell in love with many years ago.

The bottle still has about 20% of its volume. I do not think I will ever want to wear it in its current state again (as I said, it’s not unpleasant, but it’s not pleasant enough for me to want to put it on my skin). As I calculated from my 2012 post (Alien wears Prada Infusion d’Iris), I bought it the same year it was released – 2007. So, it was a good run. And I cannot make myself throw it away. So most likely it’ll go into my “retirement” box, where I store perfumes that I stopped wearing either because they spoiled or I had a change of heart and didn’t want to finish the remaining perfume, but couldn’t bring myself to part with them. And since that box contains some bottles I got 25 years ago (or even earlier), my old favorite Infusion d’Iris doesn’t have to worry about its fate. Well, at least until the rest of my collection decides to follow suit – and this is a horrifying thought.

How about you?

What Do You Do with a Perfume Bottle That’s Gone Off?