The idea of working from a blank canvas may have its artistic appeal, but it doesn't necessarily translate into creative freedom for bottle designers. If anything, it requires them to be even more thoughtful and deliberate in their approach. "I can design you a beautiful bottle, but there are billions of beautiful bottles out there," says Baron. "That isn't the point. It's about matching the history and the values and the psyche of the brand to a cultural moment and then aligning all of those elements into one clear message... The story is the most important thing."

Without a cohesive story to translate the world of a fragrance, says Baron, the entire project falls apart at the seams. "Even if the perfume is amazing, people won't buy it if they don't understand it. They need to feel a connection or it just doesn't work."

It might not seem logical to think that a perfume's image is more important than its smell, but then again, the fragrance industry hasn't grown into a multibillion-dollar affair by selling us cold, hard facts. Just consider: Chanel No. 5 rarely performs well in blind smell tests; our modern sensibilities are accustomed to lighter, airier compositions. But housed in its classic glass flacon, the fragrance is a global best seller. "People love the story and what it stands for," says Baron of the full, iconic package. Psychologically (and maybe even biologically), this makes sense. Think of how we grow to appreciate the little quirks and imperfections in the people we fall in love with. The stronger our emotional connection, the more beauty we see.

That's why the art of perfume bottle design has acquired new weight in an era where consumers often go online to experience fragrance instead of walking up to a store counter. Without the benefit of touch, human interaction, and the alchemy of scent on skin, people need something else to engage their senses and ignite their interest. And more often than not, the perfume bottle is what fills that virtual space. "It's the first form of communication and the first form of contact that people have with the scent," says De Baschmakoff. "So of course it has to resonate."

The trick is to design a bottle that resonates across the board — no small feat. A perfume can mean anything to anyone. Nina Ricci L'Air du Temps reminds me of my mother; it reminds my mother of balmy summer nights in Austria. But the bottle itself is a fixed quantity. It feels the same in our hands, it looks the same on our shelf, and it releases the same nimbus cloud of scent. It connects us.

The story behind a perfume bottle is just as heady and complex as the fragrance inside. Below, we asked designers who have dreamed up some of our favorite bottles in recent years to distill their creative vision.

All products featured on Allure are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Bottles

Three issues are involved in selecting a bottle — design, capacity, and type of closure that will be used. You might add a fourth choice, glass or plastic, but glass will almost certainly be your choice for a perfume bottle in spite of its greater cost and weight.

Design

Can you make use of a stock bottle or will you require a custom design? There are three considerations — cost, aesthetics, and brand identity. Custom bottles require design services and then, to produce the design, a certain minimum order. Using European sources the minimum cost for a custom bottle might run around $100,000. Using Chinese sources the cost might be somewhat less but there can be communications problems and the risks of a costly misunderstanding.

Cost

There are considerable savings from using a stock bottle. You avoid the design and die costs of a custom bottle and the cost of a substantial minimum order. Stock bottles are available in a large variety of sizes and shapes and can generally be ordered by the case which, for perfume bottles, may range from about 100 to 400 bottles, depending on bottle size and packing. You will typically encounter a minimum order size but for a stock bottle it is likely to be in the hundreds rather than tens of thousands or dollars.

Aesthetics

Stock bottles can satisfy the aesthetic senses of most smaller fragrance marketers. (After considering the cost of a custom bottle, stock bottles begin to look very good!) If, however, after looking at hundreds of stock bottles and finding nothing to suit your aesthetic tastes, finding an experienced package design professional and working with them to produce a custom bottle may be your best solution — if you have the money.

Brand Identity

If you intend to use your bottle as a branding tool, you will almost certainly require a custom design. Otherwise you risk finding that someone else is using the same bottle. And, with your custom design in hand, you'll want to register a design trademark, just in case.

Capacity

Bottles come in all sizes. How many ounces or milliliters of fragrance do you want to deliver? Smaller bottles — 1 ounce / 30 milliliters or less — tend to be less expensive than larger bottles. On some smaller bottles (non-rectilinear) the shape obscures the smaller volume of contents. In other cases the consumer expects the bottle to have a certain capacity such as 3.7 or 1.7 ounces or 100 milliliters.

As bottle size increases not only does the cost of the bottle generally increase (unless you hit on a particularly popular shape where volume production has driven down the price), a larger bottle also means a greater cost to fill it — more fragrance oil, more alcohol per bottle — plus a greater shipping cost. Glass is heavy. Larger bottles weigh more than smaller bottles. Twice the size means twice the shipping weight.

Type of Closure To Be Used

Your first decision here is, "cap or pump?" Will you simply close the bottle with a cap — a cheap solution — or will you close the bottle with a spray pump, a more expensive solution but one generally favored by consumers.

Bottles without a spray pump

If you decide to use a simple cap to close your bottle rather than a spray pump, your first limitation is that the bottle must have a threaded "finish" (neck) that will allow you to screw on the cap. The thread of the cap you select must match the tread of the bottle to make a proper seal.

Next you confront the issue of whether or not the bottle has a "sprinkler" neck ("finish"). A sprinkler neck is one with a smaller opening at the top, considerably smaller than the neck's diameter, so that the fragrance is "splashed" out of the bottle rather than dumped in a flood.

If you select a threaded neck bottle for a cap and the bottles does not have a sprinkler neck you can use a plastic orifice reducing plug to decrease the opening at the neck of your bottle. The plug must be the correct size to fit into the neck of your bottle and the orifice opening must be an appropriate size to dispense your fragrance.

Using A Fine Mist Spray Pump

If you are filling and closing your bottles yourself you must use a threaded neck bottle and a threaded pump. Threaded pumps are generally available in gold or silver finish but beyond that (with the exception of those developed for plastic bottles) they all look alike.

If you select a bottle that accepts either a crimp-type or a press-on pump, you will find many more choices available in a stock bottle as well as more variety in the looks of the pumps that will be available to you.

There are, however, two issues you'll confront when using crimp or press-on pumps. First, your bottles must be filled and sealed by special machinery. Thus you must take your perfume to a "filling house" (also called a "contract packager") to have your filling and assembly work done. You won't be able to do it yourself.

Second, you must find a cap (overshell) to go over the pump. Sometimes the pump supplier can provide a matching cap. Sometimes you may have to — or you many want to — have a custom cap designed and manufactured for your pump to give your bottle a more stylish look. In this second case getting a proper fit will be very important.

Resources

• Cap and Neck Finishes
  From SKS Bottle. An excellent page explaining neck size..
• How do I know how to calculate a cap & neck size?
  From U.S. Plastic Corp. Good, solid information.

Videos

• How Glass Bottles Are Made
  Excellent video first showing production of glass and how bottles are produced from it on a commercial scale.

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Homemade perfumes generally lack commercial value, regardless of how wonderful they may be, because their creators fail to record how their perfumes were made. To profit from a perfume, to sell it, to sell the rights to it, or have somebody sell it for you, you must be able to make more of it. To make more you need the formula, the record of how the perfume was made: what materials were used and how much of each material was used. While the formula is nothing more than a recipe, a simple piece of paper, it is the key to unlocking your perfume's commercial potential. With the formula in your hand you have the ability to make a few dozen bottles more or, like the celebrities, tens of thousands of bottles. How to create an international production formula for your homemade perfume is a guide to getting you started on the right foot, correctly documenting everything you do as you are doing it, and then using these notes with some basic mathematics to write a simple, accurate, universal formula for your perfume. Writing formulas for your perfumes can change the way you think about them. With your formulas in hand your creations are no longer "here today, gone tomorrow." Now, thanks to your library of formulas, your perfumes become immortal!

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Perfume is famous for the markup it can achieve, even for a middle market fragrance. While "everybody knows" that perfume costs next to nothing to make (not completely true) the making of it is often considered an esoteric secret. "Creating Your Own Perfume With A 1700 Percent Markup!" details how a 3-person company with no experience created their own fragrance in response to a marketing opportunity that was too good to pass up. The book explains exactly what was done to create a fragrance for that opportunity but it is far more than a history of the author's project. "Creating Your Own Perfume With A 1700 Percent Markup!" lays out every step in the process of creating your own perfume, either as a do-it-yourself project – and without the benefit of automated equipment some compromises and workarounds are required – or full bore professional production under your supervision. Either way you will be producing a quality fragrance at a remarkably low cost. Do you have a marketing opportunity that would be wildly profitable if only you could obtain your fragrance at a ridiculously low cost? "Creating Your Own Perfume With A 1700 Percent Markup!" is the guide you need to do it.

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When you name a perfume you create a valuable asset – the name itself. To sell your perfume you want the most effective name possible. But a good name can have value beyond the edge it gives your sales. In naming your fragrance you are creating a trademark and a trademark can have value independent of the product. The value of that trademark can vary. Much depends on how well, in naming your perfume, you follow the trademark "rules." How To Create A More Valuable Name For Your Perfume first helps you develop a name that will be effective in selling your perfume. It then prods you to make use of certain techniques that can turn a good name into a great trademark, strong and valuable. If you have questions about how to protect a name, How To Create A More Valuable Name For Your Perfume will answer many such as:

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How To Create A More Valuable Name For Your Perfume covers both state, federal, and international protection.

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Philip Goutell
Lightyears, Inc.