There are many ways to store perfumes, but all these ways are certainly not all right. Perhaps you picked up some of these storage how-to suggestions from a fragrance-loving friend or your parents while growing up or from a blog post on the internet. The time you will spend reading this fragrance piece is the best time to change and get the maximum value for the hard-earned bucks you spend on perfumes.
Let us show you how to effectively store perfumes.
How to [Effectively] Store Perfumes
1: Store Them Dry and in a Dark Place
This sounds cliche, but we need to make sure that this cliche sticks to your memory. Your perfumes appreciate being kept in the dark and not as an ornament in your bedroom or elsewhere; sunrays, any form of natural light, and even artificial light break down the chemical composition of your perfumes, and in turn, you get less scent value with each spritz.
When it comes to storing your perfumes in a dry place versus a wet place, it is akin to water and oil: they do not coexist peacefully. Perfumes abhor water because, just like natural/artificial lights, water affects its chemical composition.
Dry and dark places are the best places for your perfumes. We recommend finding the darkest and driest spots in your room/home to keep your perfumes smelling as they were intended.
2: Low-Level Storage Areas
High storage spaces do not work for perfumes. Why? The fragility of perfume bottles. These bottles could fall, break, and spill. But what if your perfumes come in plastic bottles? Of course, the fall will not lead to breakage and spillage. Still, the erratic movements your perfume content experiences from that high storage space before it hits the ground or any other surface will affect its chemical composition.
This concept remains with shaking your perfumes vigorously. Your perfumes were carefully created and tested for stability before they were produced and bottled. They do not need to be shaken at all by you. Expensive niche fragrances may be made from expensive and rare ingredients that are blended and macerated to perfection. When you drop or shake the bottle, the costly and rare ingredients inside are dashed violently against each other and the side of the glass breaking down the fragrance particles prematurely.
So, choose low-level storage areas such as a nightstand, the bottom section of your wardrobe, cabinets, and closets when storing your perfumes. And avoid using the top of your washing machine, top of your wardrobe, or high shelves as storage areas.
3: Store Them in Their Original Bottles and Packaging
There is certainly no need to be creative with the storage containers your perfumes come in. Getting creative with them means you are asking for these types of trouble: loss of scent, discoloration, the rancid smell when you spritz your perfume on a piece of your clothing or your body, etc. When you decant or open your perfume bottles, this is not what the creators of the fragrance intended. Breaking the seal of a fragrance bottle can introduce dust, dander, air, or other particles into your fragrances. Even broken parts of the atomizer or glass bottle can enter the perfume inside if you try and open the original bottle.
This can lead to other unforeseen problems with the fragrance inside, such as condensation, mold, and bacteria.
Is it worth it to break into that expensive bottle of perfume to put its contents at risk? Would you buy a decant or sample from someone other than the manufacturer knowing that these types of problems may occur? Also, how can you be sure precisely that you are getting the original fragrance you are seeking when buying a decant from a 2nd or 3rd hand. It is quite a common scam for decanters to dilute or even replace the expensive original fragrances, and if you have never smelled the original, would you even know the difference?
4: Perform the Discoloration Check
It is crucial to routinely perform discoloration checks on your perfumes. For instance, if one of your perfumes is a sky blue-looking fragrance and after a month, its color dims to a slight shade of midnight blue, there is a problem. It does not matter if its scent is still the same and not diluted; discoloration means that your perfumes are bad and should possibly be discarded.
Inversely, there are high-quality fragrances that are created with perfume and fragrance oils that are so fine that they actually get stronger, more potent, and smell even richer over time.
This is the case with the niche luxury perfume house Argos Fragrances. Its fragrances are well known to get darker, richer, and even more powerful over time. If you followed the suggested recommendations in this article and were to purchase an Argos Fragrance, you would notice the perfume colors get darker. The fragrance would smell more potent, richer, and beautiful over time.
5: Store Them in Sealed Bottles - Before First Use and Afterwards
Keep your perfumes packaged until the first spritz; there is usually a subtle countdown timer that is activated once a perfume is unsealed and the first spritz is worn on the body or any surface. Oxidizing, which is the combination of chemicals and oxygen, happens immediately when the first spritz is let out from a perfume bottle/container.
After the first spritz, cover/seal them properly and put them back in their boxes. Your perfumes abhor air as well (so that makes it three elements: light, water, and air; add dust, aka earth, to this abhorrence mix). Cap it after use to prevent it from evaporating into the atmosphere or reducing its scent.
This is another reason that decanting is not a best practice for your perfumes.
Putting them in smaller bottles for resale not only adds the above-mentioned mix into your expensive fragrances, but you must also put into question the smaller containers they are in. Many are cheap, plastic, have poor seals, leak, may be dusty or dirty, to begin with, have poor quality atomizers that leak and introduce air back into the perfume liquid and are not suitable for your perfumes.
6: Do Not Shake The Bottles/Containers.
Your perfumes in their bottles/containers are not like juice or beverages in juice bottles/containers, so they are definitely not best shaken before use. The contents of the bottles/containers have been finely produced to have the same notes and chemical composition from the top of the bottle to the bottom, so there is no need to shake them to get the best scent. Just spritz and go about your business for the day. Shaking before spritzing potentially ruins the fragrance experience.
7: Temperature Check is Important Too
Your perfumes are not to be kept/stored in areas with fluctuating temperatures (temperatures that are not decisive); by this, we mean that your perfumes are best not kept in storage areas where one moment, it is cold and the next moment, it is warm or hot. Storage areas with vacillating temperatures or alternating polar temperatures could work for other items but not for perfumes.
Perfumes are choosy in matters of temperature, and you should normally aim for 60°.
This means that leaving your perfumes near HVAC vents or near a window that not only lets in light but is subject to extreme temperature changes are not good places to keep your fragrances. Also, consider the bathroom vanity. It is not a good place either as the humidity and temperature changes from the shower or bath may also damage your fragrances. Take a look up or down at your HVAC vents in the bathroom after a shower.
If you notice condensation, it is a pretty good indication that your ventilation in that room is not great and that storing your perfumes in that room may also be a bad idea.
8: Bathrooms Are Not a Good Storage Space
Bathrooms are NEVER suitable storage spaces for your perfumes; this follows loosely from the above section on vacillating temperatures and the prior mention of perfumes' abhorrence of water. Keep your perfumes outside the bathroom.
Eau de Toilette, as the name does not imply in this case, is not a license to store your perfumes in the toilet room.
9: Smaller Bottles Matter
Smaller bottles matter because they are easy to carry around. They count most when you are traveling from one state, country, or continent to the other. However, keep our earlier discourse about keeping perfumes in their original bottles in mind; with this and the case for smaller bottles, we recommend purchasing a miniature version of your perfumes.
A good number of perfumes have travel-sized or mini-sized bottles of the same perfumes; you just have to look for them or ask a fragrance store such as Argos Fragrances. Argos carries an entire line of economical single or short-term use atomizers to reusable luxury perfume atomizers that can be utilized on shorter trips safely again and again without having to lug around the large 100ml bottles.
ARGOS Black Bullet Refillable Atomizer 4ML
ARGOS Black Pen Refillable Atomizer 3.1ML
ARGOS Black Oval Refillable Atomizer 5.2ML
Argos Fragrances also carries each of their luxury niche fragrances in a smaller 30ml size and even offers a luxurious genuine leather dust bag to protect the beautiful glass bottle and to keep out dust, sunlight, and other undesirables from their perfumes.
Argos Fragrance Triumph of Bacchus 30ml Perfume Bottle
Honorable Mention: Can You Keep Perfume in the Fridge?
We have surveyed several industry professionals, and the response is mixed.
Some state they always keep new fragrances in a refrigerator, and others warn of the potential problems with doing so.
We will list the positives. There is a constant regulated temperature. Usually, the fridge is dark, so you do not have to worry about sunlight, and even if you open the fridge door on occasion, you can store the fragrance bottles in the back or away from the front so that sunlight does not have a chance at breaking down your precious fragrances. Now here is a list of the potential problems; If you are storing your perfume bottles in your fridge, how clean is it? We have seen surveys of the average persons' fridge. We are quite alarmed about the amount of mold and bacteria that grow in the average person's refrigerator and not to mention all the other nasty little things that people store in their fridge.
We don't know the risk of storing your 300 dollar bottle of perfume next to the partially sealed/exposed leftover turkey from last Thanksgiving, but it doesn't sound like a good idea.
Also, taking your perfumes in and out of the fridge constantly or even occasionally is not great for the perfumes as the fluctuating temperature variants are not good for your fragrance, as mentioned above, and it would mean an even greater level of temperature change going from a fridge to room temperature. So, in summary, the verdict is still out on storing your perfumes in the fridge, but if you are storing them in a clean mini fridge such as one made for wine for the long term, it might just be worth it to save your fragrances. Let us know what you think about storing your perfumes in the fridge.
These nine ways of effectively storing your perfumes have been tested many times over. Hence, they can be trusted to give you the best value for your perfumes' collection. You can never go wrong with any or all of them; we recommend bookmarking this perfumes storage guide for recurrent use in the near or distant future.
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