A New Use for a Vintage Find - Perfume Sample Storage

Ok, Perfumistas, we can't all be Donatella Versace with her fantastic perfume cabinets. If you haven't seen the gorgeous shelves, check out this handy article on perfume storage. We also can't buy ever single bottle that strikes our fancy (try as we might)! So I'm sure that many of you have turned to great websites like The Perfumed Court and Lucky Scent for decants and samples. This feeds our insatiable need to try new things, revisit old favorites long discontinued, and check out niche perfumes. Not only that, if you are a makeup maven, there are plenty of perfume samples provides with cosmetic orders. So what to do with all of these bottles?

I hit a wall where I had bottles and little promo packets exploding everywhere. I would want to wear a sample that I knew I possessed only to find myself digging through boxes and bags forever and come up empty handed. Frustrated by this situation, I started looking for a drawer organizer. But a few problems arose. 1) The drawer that I intended to use was full of wallets and other small goods. Where would I now house them? 2) It is difficult to find an organizer to fit that would also make it easy to access the bottles and their respective brand labels. I even tried spice drawer organizers! After some pondering, muddling, and general procrastination, it hit me like a bolt of lightning (of course, it's months later!).

Here's what now houses my perfume collection.

This is a vintage Mele jewelry box. I happened to already have this one. It had been a container for all the buttons and bobs that come on sweaters and other clothes. I had a better drawer for these so they moved. I also purged my jewelry collection and was able to find homes for the charm collection that was in the upper level of the box. I love Mele boxes because they have multiple compartments that are flexible to being used with a variety of items unlike other boxes that have definite spots for rings or earrings. This box retails on EBay for an average of $10 which is a great deal considering some of the options for storage were much more expensive. Granted my box is not the prettiest Mele box with it's very 70's harvest gold exterior and interior. There's some very chic black ones on EBay. However, I'm perfectly happy with it's utility for now.

I just adore the ability to organize by brand or type. I have organized mine by designer. I also like the ability to have different sized bottles. In the drawers below, I placed the extremely tall or out-sized bottles, in addition to some of the smaller roller balls. Plus, I close the lid and drawers to the box and I won't have to worry about dusting tons of little bottles!

The only glitches that I found to my storage system were minor. First, I am a little obsessive about keeping the sheaths that surround the sample. I like to have the advertising/packaging available. But since I don't look at it all of the time and all of my bottles are labeled, I flattened the packaging out and tucked it in a box which I can then easily put away in my closet shelves. Second, now that I am relying on the bottles for labels, it may not be easy to read them. Not that I need reading glasses but the lighting in my bedroom is reliant on task and situation lighting. In other words, it's not very bright and to get to a light source, the box would have to be moved - not ideal. As I was cleaning up and going through bottles of lotion by my bedside (who doesn't have a ton of those!), I stumbled across the reading light that clips on to a book, still in it's package - a forgotten remnant of christmas stocking stuffers. The clip is large and durable so I clipped it on to the lid of the box. It's ugly. So ugly that I could not in all conscience take a picture of it. But the light's snake like ability and bright white light make reading bottles a breeze! Maybe I will bedazzle it. No that might be crazy.

In front of the box, my larger bottles of perfume have a home on the marble toilet tray that I purchased from Marshall's. Well, at least some of my bottles!

Blackberry Crush

When I woke up this morning, I reached for my tiny sample bottle of Mistral's Wild Blackberry. With the heat of the summer upon us, even in the mildest way possible here in my NW corner, I longed for the dog days of my childhood summers. My mother would pack up every bucket and plastic container in the house. And we would drive the very short distance in the 1970's station wagon to the elementary school. Normally we could walk this distance but not fully loaded with what we planned to bring home. Behind the cyclone fence, and a long walk across the school's barren playground was the blackberry patch. Now to say patch seems minuscule because it was really acres and acres of blackberries and swamp - more berries than swamp though. We would meet the neighbors there and go in groups because it was so large that my mother was terrified we would get lost in the winding trails. I have never been in a blackberry patch as big as that one since but I'm sad to say that it is now a thing of lore. Development took over the blackberries nearly 20 years ago.
As a child, I hated picking berries in the heat of the day. Not to mention these brambles rose to the sky in mounds taller than my house. There was always a risk that someone would get stung by a bee or worse, stumble across a nest of yellow jackets. We didn't have to cut through too many thickets because someone had always been there before us. However, there was never a shortage of berries and we came out stained not just on our fingers but all over our clothes and shoes. You never wanted to go in the brambles without a good pair of jeans and even then, you were bound to get slashed and scratched through them. And to be honest with you, I'm never sure why my mother took us over to the berry bushes. She wasn't a pie baker. She despised making jam. So we froze the berries and if we were lucky they ended up on our pancakes in the dead of winter. But now that I am older, perhaps in defiance of my mother, I both bake pies and make jam. And what I wouldn't give to go back to that magnificent blackberry nirvana and pick buckets and buckets of blackberries!

In the meantime, to fuel my obsession, I am wearing Mistral's Wild Blackberry perfume which smells like the warm patch in the sun or my blackberry and orange pie.

Image Source - Apothica