Perfume Bottle Design: A Lost Art

Sometimes design becomes a lost art.  

Such is the case with perfume bottles, which, in eras past, were not just designed, they were made into exquisite works of art. Alas, most modern perfume bottles are either pedestrian or outright atrocious examples of design without a hint of artistry.

The decline of the art of scent containers has paralleled the downturn in the actual use of perfume – ironically at a time that every celebrity and wannabe feels compelled to launch his or her own brand.

I’m an old-fashioned girl who grew up in an era where you weren’t dressed until you had properly applied perfume – either by spritzing it in the air and stepping into it, or discreetly applying it to pulse points. There’s nothing wrong with the lighter scents that are being developed now, but give me a full-on bordello smell any day, dripping with hibiscus, gardenias and roses. The right perfume, applied well, is sexy, feminine and glamorous.

The creators of perfume bottles as works of art – dating back to ancient Egyptian and Roman eras – understood this. This was particularly true of the designer-artists who created vials around the turn of the 20th century up until about the 1950s.

Take, for example, the works of René Lalique, a prolific glass artist whose catalogue of perfume bottles is stunning in its beauty and variety. An artist who worked during both the Art Nouveau and Art Deco eras, influences of both periods can be seen in some of his creations, but he had a style of his own. One of my favorites is his “Trésor de la Mer” (“Treasure of the Sea”).

Another Frenchman of the Art Nouveau period whose scent vials are exquisite is Émile Gallé, who developed the technical innovation known as marqueterie sur verre. It involved the building up of the decoration of a piece by pressing lumps of colored glass into the warm, soft body, rolling the surface to smooth the insets which, when cool, would be given identifiable form by wheel carving. 

Yet another wonderful example of Art Nouveau work is a green-and-white frosted glass bottle, designed by Maurice Depinoix in 1912 for Lubin's "Au Soleil" perfume. It features the applied forms of a lizard wrapped around the long stem of the bottle as well as an insect resting upon its floral-inspired finial stopper. The period is illustrated perfectly because one of the major influences of that era was the depiction of nature, often with sexual overtones, that reflected the work of Darwin.

Moving to a later era, one of my favorite scent containers is the iconic Nina Ricci “L’Air du Temps” with its glass dove stopper, which was launched in 1948 after World War II as a symbol of peace. I have a personal reason for loving this particular perfume – I bought my first bottle at a time in my life when I was asserting my independence as a woman, financially and in other ways.

As time moved on, the art of perfume bottles declined. In one case, a container custom designed by celebrity jeweler Martin Katz with designers at DKNY, is so gaudy as to be almost tasteless. Encrusted with diamonds and rare gemstones, the luxury perfume bottle sold for a whopping $1 million. But it had two saving graces – a diamond skyline of New York City I rather like and the fact that the proceeds for the piece went to Action Against Hunger, an international humanitarian charity.

There are no saving graces, however, for many of the perfume vials being designed today. In fact, if you do an Internet search for “ugly perfume bottles,” you come up with many horrendous examples of the decline of the art – including, not surprisingly, one for Paris Hilton’s scent.

But for my money, nothing is uglier or more tasteless than Nicki Minaj’s perfumes. It’s enough to make an old-fashioned girl like me want to bring back Lalique, Gallé and other masters back from the dead.

Eleanor Schrader is an award-winning architectural and interior design historian, professor and consultant who lectures worldwide on the history of architecture, interiors, furniture, and decorative arts. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter.