How I ended up buying and selling antique perfume bottles?
It wasn’t a decision.
It was a return: to my mother’s dressing room, her seasonal scents, and the silent legacy in her empty bottles.
Hi, I am Lynn Garson
I am an attorney and have been since 1981. I started out practicing law at a big firm in Atlanta and found that I did not like it. I quit without knowing what I would do, only that it would not be what I had been doing. (I wouldn’t do that today; I am now a believer in “Don’t quit a job until you have a job,” but I was not very well attached to reality back then.) Not long after I quit, I was driving by the Atlanta Decorative Arts Center and a thunderbolt struck me.
When I was 5 years old, I would go into my mother’s dressing room and watch her funnel various perfumes into bottles as she prepared them for the different seasons. She even had some for the different times of day- a few to spray in the morning, a spritz after lunch, a sprinkle before dinner. The bottles she used were beautiful, with intricate designs and detailed gold-plated pumps (top end Marcel Franck, I now know). When I was 16, I recall accompanying my mother on a trip to Paris and visiting Catherine’s on Rue Castiglione where she bought most of her perfumes. I remembered this experience so vividly that when I went back to Paris in my late twenties, I returned to that street and bought my own perfumes from Catherine, as well as the most gorgeous umbrellas I have ever seen.
When my mother died in 2017, the very last thing I took from her apartment was her collection of Marcel Franck perfume bottles. There were only five or six remaining, and I hadn’t paid any attention to them in years. Yet when I walked past the shelf holding the collection that final time, I was compelled to turn around and take them with me. More recently, while considering how to reinvent myself as I began stepping away from my legal career, the words “perfume bottles” came to me and I knew in that moment that I had found my true passion.
That’s why Southern Vapors exists today. And while it is a business, it is also a place of passion. For that reason, you can feel assured that any bottle you buy—be it an Avon giraffe or a fine Czech bottle with an intricate intaglio—was curated, researched, treasured and loved here at Southern Vapors.