Antique Silver Scent Bottles between £0 and £0
A small bottle for carrying perfume, with silver as the whole body or, more often, as the collar, cap or hinged top on glass, porcelain or shell.
What Are They?
Half the listings name glass, and a quarter use the word "mounted", so the bottle you're most likely to meet is a Victorian silver-mounted or silver-topped cut glass one. "Victorian" appears in 421 of the titles. Sizes run from miniature chatelaine bottles up to large dressing-table bottles.
Colour does a lot of the work. Cranberry, blue, green, amethyst, ruby, amber, opaline and turquoise between them account for a large slice of the titles, and overlay glass, cut back to show the layer beneath, turns up throughout. Forms include double-ended, egg, cornucopia, bullet, heart and novelty shapes.
The other branches are smaller. Silver and enamel bottles, usually guilloche over an engine-turned ground, make up about one in ten and cluster in Edwardian, 1920s and 1930s dates. All-silver bottles and flasks are a visible minority, and silver-topped porcelain, tortoiseshell, jade, agate and bone bodies a smaller one, the speckled bird's-egg bottle being a recurring family of its own.
Dating varies listing by listing. Victorian leads the dealer date field with 362 entries, then Edwardian and the 1920s, with decade tags spread from the 1870s to the 1930s. Many titles say "circa 1890" rather than carrying a hallmark year. Birmingham is the assay office most often named, ahead of London by more than two to one.
Where The Range Sits
Glass treatment separates the bands more than anything else. At the lower end a title reads simply "cut glass and silver scent bottle"; higher up it names colour, overlay or cased glass, Bohemian triple casing, millefiori or latticino. Sixty-six titles say overlay, and those sit well clear of plain clear-glass bottles.
Form matters next. Novelty and figural bottles go straight to the top: an articulated fish vinaigrette, an owl, a snake, a hunting horn, a paint tube, a mandolin, a violin, a pea pod. Each appears only once or twice across the whole archive. Guilloche enamel sits in the upper half of the range, and pictorial enamel scenes higher still.
Information and completeness lift a bottle too. The cheapest samples name no maker and no assay office, while mid and upper listings give Birmingham, London or Chester with a year and a maker's name. Original cases, pairs, three-bottle scent sets and fitted dabbers all sit above comparable single bottles.
Retail Price Guide 2026
Typical UK retail prices for silver scent bottles between £0 and £0, calculated from the Sellingantiques database of over a million retail prices indexed since 2003. This retail price guide relies exclusively on Sellingantiques data; no external sources or auction records are used, so the figures do not describe the wider market.
Victorian is the period label used most on Sellingantiques for silver scent bottles, with Edwardian next and the 1920s third.
Sampson Mordan
The Antique Silver Scent Bottles between £0 and £0 Glossary
- Silver-mounted, silver-topped
- The silver is a collar, cap or hinged lid on a body of glass, porcelain or shell, not the whole bottle. Half the archive is built this way.
- Double-ended
- One bottle with a lid at each end, scent at one end and a vinaigrette or smelling salts at the other. Around 24 titles use the term.
- Overlay, cased glass
- Coloured glass layered over clear, or the reverse, then cut back so both layers show. Dealers also write "cut through" for the same thing.
- Guilloche enamel
- Translucent enamel laid over an engine-turned silver ground, giving a rippled sheen. Fifty-two titles use the word, almost all on twentieth-century bottles.
- Chatelaine bottle
- A small bottle with a ring or chain fitting, made to hang from a waist clasp. Often the smallest thing in the category.
- Etui
- A fitted case holding the bottle, here usually Georgian silver or tortoiseshell. Sliced-cut, another recurring title word, describes flat faceting on coloured glass.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a silver-topped scent bottle?
It's a bottle of glass, porcelain, tortoiseshell or another material with a silver cap, collar or hinged lid. The silver tops were made to hold volatile perfume in.
Half the listings on Sellingantiques name glass as the body, and a quarter use the word "mounted". All-silver bottles are the smaller group.
Which period do most of them come from?
Victorian, by a clear margin. It leads the dealer date field with 362 entries, ahead of Edwardian and the 1920s.
Decade tags run from the 1870s through to the 1930s, and the recorded dates stretch from 1800 to 1960. Only a portion of listings carry a clean year at all, so many read "circa 1890" instead.
Are coloured glass bottles common?
Colour is the single most-recorded feature after the silver. Cranberry appears in 48 titles, blue in 59, green in 52, amethyst in 32.
Ruby, amber, opaline and turquoise follow. Coloured and overlay glass sits above plain cut clear glass in the range.
What does guilloche enamel mean on a scent bottle?
Translucent enamel over an engine-turned silver ground. The machine-cut pattern shows through the enamel as a rippled sheen.
Fifty-two titles use the term, and they cluster in Edwardian, 1920s and 1930s dates rather than Victorian ones. They sit in the upper half of the range.
Which assay office appears most often?
Birmingham. It's named in 158 titles against 65 for London, so more than two to one.
Chester and Sheffield turn up only in scattered examples.
Do novelty shapes come up often?
Once in a blue moon. An articulated fish vinaigrette, an owl, a snake, a paint tube, a mandolin, a violin, a hunting horn, a pea pod and a moon flask each appear only once or twice across the whole archive.
When they do appear, they go straight to the top of the range. Around 110 scent bottles are listed a year on Sellingantiques, handled by 66 different dealers.