Are Antique Perfume Bottles Worth Collecting?
It is strange how your opinions and experiences changes as you get older. When I was a kid, I hated antiques. I was bored to tears by my aunt’s collection of antique perfume bottles. I couldn’t figure out why you would even want an antique perfume bottle. One time, when I was very small, I accidentally knocked over one of her perfume bottle antiques. I was a little kid, and little kids are always clumsy. Besides that, it was in a place where it was easy not to see and to accidentally knock over. Nonetheless, she let me have it over that one. She insisted that it was the most valuable piece in her perfume bottles collection, although it looked perfectly ordinary to me. She said that she would never be the same.
Since then, I have always been appalled by her collectible perfume bottles. Antique perfume bottles, in fact, came to symbolize everything that was wrong about the grown-up world. I could not even go into the room where she kept her antique perfume bottles, although this caused my mother much grief. You see, my aunt loved nothing more than to show off. She had an antique price guide, and she would use it to show off how much her antique perfume bottles were worth. Even nowadays I find it tacky, but back then I found it appalling. I wanted to break every last antique perfume bottle in that whole place!
Then one day, when I was coming home to visit her from college, I actually looked at her antique perfume bottles. They really were beautiful. I don’t think I liked them in the same way that she liked them. For her, they were simply things to be collected. She needed to acquire them. It was almost a sick need, really. I saw something different. The antique perfume bottles were works of art. I resolved that one day I would have a collection of antique perfume bottles that was all my own.
As it turns out, that wish came true. My great aunt - always a peculiar person - decided to leave her antique perfume bottles to me in her will. Everyone thought that it was a great joke, and that I was the one person who would not appreciate them. Little did they know that my tastes had changed. I didn’t give the antique perfume bottles away to my other family members. I kept them all to myself.