Multiple Bottles and Flankers

When I first started my perfume journey, I could never imagine owning more than one bottle and it never crossed my mind to own a flanker. I never imagined that I would have back up bottles, let alone vintage bottles, of anything about 7 years of perfume collecting. This horror of owning multiple bottles came when I had looked at my bottle collection and saw my stock of no. 5 in various concentrations and 4 bottles of Shalimar.

Some of this stemmed from the whole 'limited edition' bit that Chanel loves to peddle on the website. I kid you not, when you look at no. 5 (for a while it was) and no. 19 in EDP form online, there is the 'limited edition'. Since I love no. 5 and did hear about the potential reformulation, I did load up on the EDP and EDT form.

Shalimar, as good as it is, is actually not a perfume that I wear often. I either forget about it or it just doesn't suit that particular day when I think of wearing it. In this case, I don't have back up bottles in a literal sense. My back up bottles have been in the form of two vintage EDT bottles. At the time, I was still kind of wanting the tear drop bottle and vintage Shalimar is easy and cheap to find of E-bay.

I've never been much of a fan about flankers, especially when it comes down to classic perfume. My thought has always been, why mess around with a classic? No. 5 Eau Premiere was the first Chanel flanker that I tried and at first, I didn't like it. It smelled like a toned down no. 5 but it's messing around with a classic. I had tried no. 19 Poudre and was horrified by what it smelled like. No. 19 Poudre smelled a lot like Prada's Infusion d'Iris and nothing like the original no. 19. If you are going to mess around with flankers and classics, try to make it resemble the original perfume.