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.