Mini Perfume Haul

C and I had yesterday off together so we decided to head to the coast.  We love going antiquing together and there's a huuuuge mall in the beach town closest to us that always has some fun stuff to look at.

One of the things I've been perpetually in search of is vintage perfume.  If you're wondering why...  Perfumes of yesteryear were made with different, more natural, ingredients as a rule, including real musk and authentic plant extracts.  Over the years, though, such items became depleted, more expensive, proven to exacerbate allergies, or banned in the name of ethics, and so the art of perfumery has evolved.  The perfumes have, too, along with their purpose, to an extent.  A perfume first conceived in the 1920s will have gone through many reformulations and iterations.  Some vintages are better than others.  I'm not in any way up on which are the "best," but I've learned over the years what is sought after and, of course, what I will actually wear.  Most the time, it's just fun to see an older fragrance with its heart still intact.

  So this antique mall ended up being a treasure trove of perfume yesterday.  One of the vendors had a bunch of little sandwich bags with five minis each selling for $5 a bag.  Sometimes the vendors know the worth of their items, sometimes they don't, and sometimes they just want to move their product.  These all probably came from an estate sale and I was lucky to find one bag with a couple beauties I've been curious about, even if only one qualifies as an honest to goodness vintage.

First up is Coty L'Aimant cologne, Coty's first fragrance, launched in 1927, and the best find of the bunch.  I'm going to guess this bottle is 1970s or '80s (25 years old makes a fume "officially" vintage).  It's a soft, aldehydic floral with the same creamy quality present in Chanel No.5, but with a sweetness to it.  You know how some lipsticks have a soft, sweet scent to them?  That same intriguing, just starting to decay rose note is in L'Aimant.  It's a cologne, so the highest concentration of alcohol to essential oil, and it doesn't last terribly long on me.  Even so, the scent is soft and lovely, and reminds me very much of a woman's dressing table.

Second is Van Cleef & Arpels First, the first fragrance to come out of the jeweler's house, launched in 1979.  My little bottle does not look old at all, and the painted plastic cap is a good indicator that this one isn't actually a vintage.  It's more than likely from this decade.  It was intriguing to me because I received a veeeeery tiny amount of an actual vintage as a gift and smelling the vapors from the bottle was just a beautiful experience.  I got excited at the prospect of being able to actually wear some.  Because mine is fairly new, though, it doesn't smell like the original-- there's a richness that just isn't there-- but it is still beautiful white floral with a girlish lily of the valley/muguet and a slightly dirty jasmine heart.  This one is a parfum, the formulation with the highest concentration of essential oils, so it tends to hug the skin better and last a little longer.

The beach itself was gorgeous, warm, and sunny, which is always a pleasant surprise on the Oregon coast.  C took a shot of the two of us standing on the beach where he proposed to me ten years ago.  We revisit the spot a lot. ♥

Thanks for reading and enjoy the weekend :)