The vinaigrette — a tiny silver or gold box with a perforated inner lid over a sponge soaked in aromatic vinegar, carried to revive the senses or mask unpleasant smells — appears in poems about Regency and early Victorian femininity and the culture of delicacy; A poem about a fainting scene in a drawing room might describe the vinaigrette: "the box produced from her reticule, the inner lid opened to release the vinegar — the smelling salts of an age that believed the sensitive woman required constant rescue from the world's roughness"; The vinaigrette's miniature scale and exquisite execution — often engraved, enamelled, or set with stones — give it a place in poems about the aesthetics of the very small: "the smallest beautiful thing in the room, carried closest to the person — the box no larger than a secret"; In a poem about the gap between feminine fragility and feminine endurance, the vinaigrette is an irony: "she carried the means of her own revival everywhere she went — the delicacy was performed, the endurance was constitutional"; A poem about a Regency social gathering might describe the vinaigrette's use when the conversation grew heated: "she opened the box — not from faintness but from strategy, the brief pause allowing the room to reconsider"; In a poem about a jeweller's cabinet, the vinaigrette appears among the smallest and most intimate objects: "made for the nose, not the eye — and yet made as beautifully as anything made for display, the inner lid as fine as the outer, the private as considered as the public."