Is it safe to buy vintage perfume?
Yes and no.
A perfume may have an expiration date on the packaging, the so-called "shelf life", but perfume cannot be compared to food. Most perfumes have a very long shelf life. It just depends on which perfume it is, how the scent has been stored and how it is composed. You can imagine that a perfume that is always kept in a warm bathroom or on the windowsill in the sun can be considered as lost, regardless of whether it was of good quality or not. Exposure to heat, oxygen and light is not beneficial for perfumes. As beautiful as it is to display your perfumes, it is better to store them in a dark cupboard or drawer, preferably in the box, but the latter is not necessarily necessary.
Perfumes always consist of top notes, middle notes and base notes. Top notes are often essential oils such as bergamot, lemon and orange. Base notes are often the slightly heavier components such as flowers (jasmine, rose, tuberose) and fruits such as peach, pineapple and plum. The base notes almost always consist of musk, woods, patchouli, incense, resin, vanilla, etc.
If a perfume is a bit older and/or has been exposed to oxygen, the essential oil top notes may disappear somewhat. However, that does not mean that a perfume is spoiled. Even with a new perfume, you will smell the top notes immediately after spraying, but within fifteen minutes these will fade into the background and soon the middle and then the base will emerge. With older scents, the top notes may have disappeared, but that just means you go straight to the middle and base and still get the scent you love.
Nowadays many perfumes are made with synthetic components and this does not always improve the shelf life of perfumes. In the past, making perfume was much more of a craft and many essential oils and raw materials of excellent quality were used. Many of these raw materials are no longer allowed to be used nowadays due to all kinds of regulations. Due to the excellent quality of raw ingredients older perfumes have an extremely long shelf life. Think of it as a good old wine, which also often improves with age.
People are often afraid that a perfume is spoiled when the contents are discoloured. That is not always a bad sign either. As you can read above, the base notes are often heavier essential oils such as vanilla. If vanilla is of very good quality, the perfume will not originally be transparent, but lightly colored. Vanilla tends to "ripen" over the years and thus darken. So your perfume will also become darker and probably even sweeter. They call this maceration. Just go and buy a number of bottles of essential oils, from lemon to sandalwood, and you will see that each oil, provided it is of natural origin, has its own color and consistency that will also influence perfumes. Sometimes perfumes are given a synthetic color to counteract this process, but nature always wins. For example, your beautiful blue perfume may turn light brown after a while. Too bad the color changed, but the perfume is probably still okay.
Even for us it is sometimes difficult to judge whether a perfume is ok or spoiled. We can often tell from the packaging, bottle and color in which condition we purchase a perfume. It is of course more difficult to judge sealed packaging, because we do not want to unpack it. But since we have a lot of expertise in this area, you can rest assured that we know what we are selling. And if, in our opinion, something is slightly lower in quality, we will always mention this clearly.
Usually, however, you don't have to worry that an older perfume has gone bad, in fact, you will often notice that the scent has only become stronger, deeper and more beautiful!