Sometimes we buy several perfumes at the same time and use them for different occasions. However, we ask ourselves questions about the practices necessary to preserve a perfume! Indeed, many wonder if perfumes can withstand external conditions for a long time without losing their olfactory qualities and original smells. We will present you, through this article, the best tips that will help you preserve your perfumewell.
Before you start, you should know that the quality and shelf life of a perfume different from one fragrance to another. The majority of perfumes cannot exceed three years of shelf life despite all efforts to keep them intact longer. However, some rare fragrances have been able to be preserved for decades with very slight changes at the smells, such as old perfumes that contain natural animal raw materials such as musk.
So, with good conservation practices, you can keep your fragrances intact for three years or a little longer,but it would be very difficult to retain the original smells of a perfume for a period well beyond this one. In addition, the perfume remains usable without worries. The only difference will be in the intensity it will give off and the nuances of smells it will ensure.
As a general rule, there are four main factors that you need to consider for the good conservation of your perfume: heat, light, humidity, and exposure to air! If you manage to meet the necessary conditions to protect your perfumes from these factors, they will have a huge chance of keeping their quality for a few years.
Before going into more detail, it is very likely that you have already put on a perfume during a day when temperatures have soared, and you have been surprised by the smell that has changed, once outside, in contact with the sun and the high heat! It is a proven fact, the first enemy of a perfume is certainly high heat! Indeed, the chemical molecules that make up perfumes are diluted by high temperatures.
Fortunately, it is not the whole bottle that is suddenly exposed to the outside heat when you go out. In addition, try to keep your fragrance away from all sources of heat at home, such as stoves, ovens, heaters… This will help you to better preserve your perfume.
The most correct is to find a place where the temperature does not exceed 15 degrees. Indeed, this temperature, similar to the temperature of a spring morning, gives the perfume the ideal freshness to the retention of its smellsand its quality! That is why the Rose flowerssmell beautifully just after dawn and lose their intensity once the sun reaches them!
The second factor that can alter the quality of your perfume is the sun’s rays! Aside from the heat it gives us (which remains harmful to the fragrance if it is high), the sun’s UV rays can change the smell and quality of your fragrance.
Our skin has natural protectionagainst ultraviolet rays,and despite this, too much exposure to these rays can burn your skin (this is the case when we try to tan quickly while staying for hours under the sun). Perfume bottles have only the filters of the glass to protect them from UV rays. If the vials have a very dark color, the contents will be entitled to better protection, but which remains insufficient.
To remedy this, it is recommended to choose between keeping your perfume in a place to which the sun’s rays do not have access, such as drawers or cabinets,or simply, keeping the perfume in its box. This second solution may remain difficult for those who like to admire the beauty of the bottles…
Humidity is the third factor that influences the shelf life of a perfume! As well as heat, humid places in the house are to be avoided when trying to preserve your perfume for a long time without altering the quality of your odors.
To get around this problem of humidity (and even heat and light), some will advise you to put your perfume bottle in the refrigerator,others will tell you that it is not a good solution. For our part, we suggest that you keep the perfume in a fridge if it is used only very rarely so as not to expose it to sudden and regular temperature changes that can affect its quality!
Indeed, if it is a perfume that you wear only very occasionally,it would be very clever to keep it in the vegetable tray of the fridge. But if it’s a fragrance you use on a daily basis, going from 4 degrees to 26 degrees or more (in summer) within seconds, and then returning it in its place, could be harmful to it.
Perfumes are, above all, a chemical composition that reacts to environmental conditions. Exposure to air can quickly alter your fragrance. The reason? Dust and particles that can circulate in the air can infiltrate the perfume and promote the more accelerated oxidation of its components! Thus, it would already be necessary give priorityto vials that operate according to the principle of spraying that bottles of perfumes on wheels that require you to confront the perfume to your skin with each use, which is very easily contaminates the inside of the fragrance through sweat and other impurities.
Therefore, and even for a vaporizer bottle,we advise you to avoid opening it too often, so as not to let through the impurities and dust contained in the air inside. In the end, if your perfume has been kept for a long time and you doubt that it is too altered,try to feel it and detect if it has an unusual smell before deciding to stop using it.
These few practices will allow you to better preserve a perfume,in order to use it later, or simply to collect it. We also advise you to decant vos favorite perfumes in order to collect them without keeping the bottle in full.
If the container in question is new from a reputable supplier it should not require any cleaning. If it appears dirty (ew), 1) stop buying from that supplier and 2) wash it by hand and then either send it through a hot dishwasher or mist with 70% isopropyl alcohol or a 5% bleach solution and leave to dry.
If you are looking to re-use something, there are a few things to consider. Not everything can be safely cleaned and re-used. I’ve talked more about this in this video on DIYing and Single Use Plastics as well.
These sorts of things are typically quite easy to clean as you can easily access all of it. I will typically wash them by hand and then send them through my dishwasher, which gets steaming hot. You can also mist/swish things with 70% isopropyl alcohol or a 5% bleach solution and leave them to dry. Be sure to watch for deep scratches in your jars that can harbour bacteria.
These can be a bit trickier to clean, especially if the opening is small and they’ve contained something quite oily/greasy. If they are glass I will wash by hand as well as possible before sending through the dishwasher. I typically recycle plastic bottles after a single use (I’ve had some melt in the dishwasher!).
These need to be recycled after a single use; they have far too many complex nooks and crannies to be safely cleaned and re-used. I’ve tried, and I always end up noticing a slurry of mold somewhere in the pumping mechanism after a couple weeks—ew!
An exception to this is re-filling; if you’ve made a big batch of something like a foaming hand wash, feel free to keep refilling your foamer bottle with that hand wash. Do not try to clean it first! As long as the solution you’re sending through the pump is always a properly made and preserved finished product, you’re fine.
These are best as a single use product as well. They are almost always filled with a very waxy/greasy product that is extremely difficult to clean out of all the little nooks and crannies of the tube, and they are so inexpensive that you will waste more money, detergent, and time trying to clean them than you would if you recycled them and used a new one.
Want to learn more about my favourite types of packaging? I made a video on it!
Posted in: General Usage