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[The doves] symbolized peace after destruction, love after loss, hope after silence. The bottle captured the emotional climate of an entire generation in glass. Long after people forgot the precise scent, they never forgot those doves. The image endured. The meaning stayed.That is the power of a bottle built with intention.
— On the bottle for Nina Ricci L’Air du Temps, 1948. Read more in The Bottle That Refused to Disappear: Why Perfume Needs Its Rock Stars Back at Rolling Stone.
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Fragrance houses know that a great bottle can outlive the scent inside, but few understand this better than Guerlain. “Pierre-François-Pascal Guerlain, the founder, understood from the very beginning that the bottle is just as important as the fragrance itself,” says Prazan. In 1853, the French beauty house created Eau de Cologne Impériale for Empress Eugénie de Montijo’s wedding to Napoleon III. Its flacon, adorned with 69 gilded bees (an emblem of the Empire), became known as the Bee Bottle. “For over 170 years, it has been crafted in the same way and by the same factory,” says Prazan. “It remains the oldest perfume bottle in the world still in production today.”
— Read more in These Artistic Perfume Bottles Give Scent a New Shape at Fashion.
Our own Dr. Jessica, giving a talk at the Corning Museum of Glass earlier this year: "Perfume containers shaped like animals have been made and cherished for several millennia, with important examples surviving from ancient Egypt and the ancient Near East. From bold to beautiful to slightly spooky, small-scale interpretations of the animal kingdom have hinted at the wild side of scent in various ways over time. The modern era, however, witnessed a new proliferation of zoomorphic fragrance vessels. This lecture takes a close look at a selection of twentieth-century commercial perfume bottles shaped like birds and beasts, connecting their stories and symbolism with related developments in fashion, the fine arts, and visual culture."
Note that there is a brief introduction and then some technical difficulty; if you want to skip to the beginning of the lecture, go to about 3:09. The talk is about an hour long.
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Other bottles are shaped like animals, human figures, fruit and flowers, and one has two carnival masks facing in opposite directions. One appears to be a standoff between a parrot and a hen; it holds two fragrances and once belonged to Mozelle Sassoon, an early 20th-century art collector and philanthropist.
Read more (and look at the pictures!) in 18th-Century Perfume Bottles Come Up for Auction at The New York Times.
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“It’s part of the meaning,” says Christine Nagel, in-house perfumer at Hermès, of a bottle’s design. “For me, with scent, there is always meaning.” The two elements aligning is imperative; when they don’t, “it’s horrible”, she says. “It’s like… your great aunt knitting a terrible outfit for your lovely little baby, and you have to dress her up in it to keep everyone happy.”
— Read more in The art of the perfume bottle at Financial Times.