The words travel together, yet they describe two different objects. A sample is made by the perfume house; a decant is made by hand, from a full bottle, by someone else entirely. If you are considering either, it is worth knowing precisely what will arrive in the envelope.
The manufacturer sample
A sample, sometimes called a carded vial, is produced on the brand's own filling lines. It carries printed branding, a batch reference and, usually, between 0.7 and 2 ml of juice. It is the most official miniature a fragrance can take. Its limitation is availability: houses produce samples for the launches they wish to promote, in the markets they wish to promote them in. The rare extrait you actually want to try almost never exists in sample form.
The hand-filled decant
A decant answers that gap. A full, authentic bottle is opened and a measured quantity is transferred into a smaller vial, typically 2, 5 or 10 ml. The juice is identical to what the boutique sells; only the container changes. This is why the decant has become the connoisseur's instrument: it makes the entire catalogue of perfumery, including discontinued and boutique-exclusive compositions, available in trial quantities.
It also places the burden of trust on the person doing the filling. A decant is only as honest as its source bottle and as careful as its preparation.
Authenticity and the question of the lot
With a sealed retail bottle, the batch code printed on the base lets you trace where and when the perfume was made. A serious decanter preserves that chain rather than breaking it. At VESTIGIUM, every vial is filled from a verifiable retail bottle and labelled with the lot it came from, so the small glass in your hand can be traced back to a specific, documented original. If a seller cannot tell you which bottle your decant came from, that silence is the answer.
Glass matters more than you think
Perfume is a solution of volatile materials in alcohol. It dislikes plastic, which can exchange molecules with the juice, and it dislikes air, which slowly oxidises the top notes. The correct vessel is neutral glass with a tight atomiser or a sealed cap; we use medical-grade glass, sealed at filling, for exactly this reason. A decant prepared this way is chemically the same perfume it was in the original flacon, simply in a smaller room.
Why 2 ml is the honest trial size
Two millilitres sounds modest. It is, in fact, around 30 sprays: enough for two full wearings a week across an entire month, through warm days and cold ones, office hours and evenings. A single spray on a paper strip tells you what a perfume announces; a month of wearing tells you what it actually says on your skin, how it dries down, how often you reach for it. Anything less is an impression. Anything much more is a commitment you have not yet earned the confidence to make.
When to buy the full bottle
The signal is simple and slightly unromantic: you buy the bottle when the decant runs out and you notice its absence. Not when the opening dazzles you in the first ten minutes, and not because a review insists. If you have reached the bottom of 2 ml and your hand still moves toward where the vial used to sit, the 100 ml flacon is no longer a gamble. It is a purchase you have already rehearsed thirty times.
Sample or decant, the principle is the same: small formats exist so that the large one, when you finally choose it, is chosen with certainty. The only requirement is that the small glass tells the truth about the large one. Insist on that, and the rest is simply a matter of taste.
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