A Guide to Vintage Shalimar – Part III: Bottle Designs, Dating Bottles & eBay Tips

Trying to date vintage Shalimar and navigating eBay to find a bottle of the version that you prefer might seem, at first glance, to be an exhausting, frustrating, and complicated ordeal. However, there are some basic guidelines to make things much simpler. It’s one of those things where the learning curve is initially steep but then, suddenly, it becomes much easier and one can (almost) whip through the many eBay listings to single out the bottles which fit your precise parameters.

So, today, we’ll spend quite a bit of time on the bottle designs for vintage Shalimar, their history, their appearance, their packaging, their differences, and the methods used to try to date the bottles. The analysis will focus almost entirely on the parfum, but I’ll briefly mention the bottle designs for the other concentrations that were discussed in Part II. They’re not hard to date or figure out for the most part but it’s a different story for the parfum, particularly since most eBay sellers don’t know much about the bottles that they’re selling. I recently had to use a sort of reverse engineering or backwards analysis based on nothing more than the height dimensions (inches) of a listed bottle in order to figure out its size and possible date of release. And I’m still not sure of the latter! The process is much like playing Sherlock Holmes except, in this case, the tiny clues often don’t yield definitive answers.

Photo: my own.

Photo: my own.

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A Guide to Vintage Shalimar – Part II: EDT, PdT & EDP (1970s-1990s)

Vintage Shalimar is a glorious, head-turning, spellbinding masterpiece of complexity and opulence in its pure parfum form, but the other concentrations can be appealing in different ways or suit different needs. Today, in Part II, we’ll look at the vintage Shalimar Eau de Toilette, Parfum de Toilette, and Eau de Parfum from three decades — the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s — and the ways in which their scent differs in several side-by-side comparisons. Unfortunately, I’m afraid I’m going to have save the technical analysis on how to date bottles of Shalimar for a previously unplanned and additional section, Part III.

Vintage Shalimar in different concentrations and from different years. I'm sheepish to say that this photo doesn't include all of the bottles that I now own. Photo: my own.

Vintage Shalimar in different concentrations and from different years. Photo & bottles: my own.

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