Djedi, a Guerlain fragrance from 1926, hasn’t been in production for decades. The formula — a dry, smoky, animalic composition built around vetiver and civet, and conceived by Jacques Guerlain in the grip of the Egyptomania that followed the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb — bears no resemblance to anything sold in a department store today, which is precisely why the surviving bottles sell for upward of €3,000 on the resale market. What is inside those bottles at this point is a matter of some debate. Buyers purchase them anyway.
— Read more in Discontinued Perfume Has Become the Investment Collector’s New Birkin at Ethos.
Well, that was fascinating, and I’m glad someone writing about fragrance is laying it bare about vintages versus modern reformulations — “a bottle of Chanel No. 19 from 1980 and a bottle of Chanel No. 19 from 2020 share a name and a reference number, but not much else.” I don’t see enough of that honesty.
But they barely mentioned what’s referred to in the header, “what is inside those bottles at this point is a matter of some debate”: vintage scents can and do go bad. I have a few that have degraded to unwearability and a couple more than are heading down that road: I’ve also bought a few vintages that were completely spoiled, no fault of the seller. You really don’t know what’s inside the bottle until you put it on your skin.
Yeah, the beauty magazines cannot afford honesty.
back when I started collecting perfume (a little less than 20 years ago) there was so much cheap vintage available and it really helped me both get an education on perfume and build my collection. I still have some of those bottles today and thank goodness as I couldn’t afford them now.
Same here!