theodora.figin History, Bottles & Houses · Bath ·
Scent diaryA flea-market atomiser with a perished bulb
Found at the Sunday market, in a drizzle: a cut-glass atomiser with a gilt collar and a rubber bulb gone hard as a walnut shell, tassel half gone, no label, no name anywhere. Inside, a brown ring and a faint smell of powder and violet, nothing like whatever it once held.
5 comments
kit.clove
Old rubber smells of its own age too. Hard to tell what's bottle and what's bulb.
carys.cardiff
In Mademoiselle Bulle's guide to when cosmetics expire, the perfume part says a scent usually carries no open-jar symbol but can still turn: the smell goes flat and the colour darkens. A brown ring sounds like that.
maeve.moss
My granny had one with a bulb like that and the tassel was always the first to go, the cat saw to that and the whole dresser smelled of powder and dust and whatever was left in the glass, so it did.
theodora.fig
Mine has a brown ring and not much else. I'll keep it for the glass and the bulb, then, not the smell.
trudy.lilac
Keep it out of the sun, at least. The Class on what light, heat and air do to a perfume explains why my old ones on a south window went the way they did.