The scent bottle — a small decorative glass or porcelain bottle for perfume, often with a silver or gold stopper — appears in poems about feminine luxury and the aesthetics of the dressing table; A poem about an eighteenth-century lady's toilet might describe the scent bottle: "the cut glass catching the mirror's light, the scent inside invisible but present — the bottle a promise of what it held"; In a poem about loss, an empty scent bottle retains its association: "the stopper sealed on nothing — but the glass still held the ghost of rose and civet, the ghost more present than the scent had been"; Chelsea and Meissen porcelain scent bottles — modelled as figures, fruit, or animals — appear in poems about the eighteenth-century taste for the miniature and the surprising; The scent bottle's combination of visual beauty and olfactory promise gives it a synesthetic quality that suits poems exploring more than one sense at once; A poem about a Victorian dressing table might move through its objects in sequence, arriving at the scent bottle last: "and then the scent — the bottle smallest of all, holding the room's secret name, the thing that all the other things were dressed to suggest."