Less is More

My Chanel package has arrived today. You have no idea on how excited I was to tear into that package when it came. But the packaging seemed a little odd to me. The outer most looked a little too big. Funny thing is that the whole packaging was much too large for what I had ordered. The keepsake package that held my mini travel sprays was filled with mostly shredded tissue paper along with the receipt, return label and a cloth satchel with two samples. I couldn't help but think, "really?". I could understand some of this fancy packaging if I was ordering a gift for someone or I had made a larger purchase but not a mini travel set of no 5.

Thus far, for all the perfume that I have ordered and have had shipped to my house, none has had more unnecessary packaging than Chanel. I don't recall Luckyscent getting carried away, nor Andy Tauer. They came well packed with the appropriate sized boxes with minimal amounts of boxes and packing peanuts. Come on Chanel, the huge, fancy boxes can be used for the bigger bottles of perfume but make smaller fancy boxes for your smaller items. I also believe that maybe you should have a selection of the Les Exclusifs line samples instead of those makeup samples. I just found all of this a little excessive for what I had ordered.

The Large Bottles

Here is another post on bottle sizes, I think that it is a second post of bottle sizes, I can't be sure. But there are a few massive ones in my collection. I'm not talking about the 3.4 ounces of anything. Yes, 3.4 ounces can be a lot of perfume but I'm talking the bottles that are more than that. I'm talking those monster bottles.

It is rare to see huge bottles today. Huge as in more than 3.4 ounces in modern perfumery. Dior and Chanel have large bottles of some of their offerings but that is rare. I more often see incredibly large bottles of perfume regularly on E-Bay. The ones I see on E-Bay most often are vintage perfumes and the most common seem to be are vintage Guerlains. I do think that back in the '50's and '60's maybe even before, perfume was considered a huge luxury and you wanted the biggest bottle that one could afford. Now those bottles, even empty, are a pretty penny, if you go looking on E-Bay. Unless you have a really good thrift store, Goodwill or an antique store, you are limited to E-Bay, like I am.

Sometimes I am

Sometimes, I am a bottle slut even though I am mostly not. But what did catch my interest, is in buying a couple full bottles and an e-mail from Chanel, is changing bottle designs. The Chanel bit was the only one that kind of did rile me due to marketing.

Let's take Chanel no. 5, the larger sized (1.7 and 3.4 ounce) EDP versions and the parfum version has the classic Chanel design bottle wise while the no. 5 EDT and most Chanel EDT versions don't come in the classic bottle. But the Chanel Eau Premiere bottle was somewhat of a cross between the EDT bottles and the EDP bottle. I was okay with that because Eau Premiere did mostly smell like no. 5 but I considered it something different and did warrant something a little different. But I signed up for news letters from Chanel and was mainly getting a lot of emails about Coco Mademoiselle and all of the Chance flankers, I never much paid attention because I'm not really interested in Mademoiselle of the Chance flankers. But now, Eau Premiere is now packaged in the classic Chanel bottle and I am not impressed. But I am thinking that the younger crowd did want the classic bottle and maybe the 5 ounce bottle was a little over the top. After owning 2 of the huge 6.5 Les Exclusifs line, I can relate and wished that Chanel offered the 2.5 ounce bottles of the Les Exclusifs line much earlier. But still, it annoys me and for no real reason that I can fathom.

But I did like how Andy Tauer seemed to revamp his bottle design after just getting Une Rose Chypree. The wooden cap to his line was a kind of a bad fit for his sprayers because they never did stay all that well and they seemed to absorb every other scent imaginable. But when getting Une Rose Chypree, I expected it to look exactly like Une Rose Vermeille because it looked like it when I bought it off of Luckyscent. I was in for a pleasant surprise when the bottle color was brown, plastic cap and the fact that it didn't have the glass beads. Which was cool in away but I'm one of those who if it's a 50 ml bottle, I want the most perfume available and not have something that isn't much more than a filler no matter how cool it looks.

For a long while, I was flirting with Viktoria Minya's Hedonist just because it has many of the notes that I do love in a perfume but wasn't so thrilled with the price since the bottle was filled with crystals and dropped from 50ml to 45ml of perfume. But I did get it and the presentation from the box to the perfume is phenominal and it's like buying a full bottle of Amouge in many ways just by looks alone. I figured that this is Minya's first perfume, presentation probably means quite a bit and just by taking off the cap and getting a whiff, it smells like it's a little more worth the price point.

But at the end of the day, with my perfume collection, buying huge bottles is not my style anymore. If I were looking to be loyal to just one or two perfumes, a larger bottle would be worth it but since I have about 30-50 bull bottles of perfume, it's less is more. And niche perfumes are a little more difficult to obtain and I am kind of forced to do more online shopping than I would really like but I do love the thrill of knowing that a package is arriving at my doorstep on a certain day, it's like Christmas.