The practice
A full bottle is
an expensive gamble.
Fragrance behaves differently on every person, and differently again in the 30–35°C a Saigon afternoon holds all year. A scent that reads elegant in a Paris showroom can turn cloying by noon on Nguyễn Huệ, and the same bottle can sit flat and closed through a Hanoi winter. The only reliable test is wearing it — properly, for days, in your own weather.
That is what a decant is for. Five or ten millilitres, sealed in glass, at a fraction of the price of the bottle it came from.
- What exactly is a decant?
- A measured amount of fragrance transferred from a full retail bottle into a smaller glass atomiser. Same liquid, same batch, smaller vessel. Nothing is added, diluted, or reconstructed.
- Why 5ml and 10ml?
- Five millilitres is roughly 50 sprays and ten is roughly 100 — about one week and two weeks of daily wear. Either is long enough to see how a fragrance behaves on your skin across a working week, a humid afternoon, and an air-conditioned office, which is exactly what a 2ml sample cannot tell you.
- How do I know it's genuine?
- Every listing names the batch code of the bottle it was split from, and we keep the retail receipt. If a listing's batch changes, the product page changes with it — this matters most for Creed, where batch variation is real and well documented.
- Why does shipping take longer to the provinces?
- Fragrance is alcohol-based and therefore classed as a flammable liquid, so it cannot travel by air freight within Vietnam. Everything moves by road: 1–2 days within Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi, 3–5 days to the provinces.
- Can I return a decant?
- Unopened decants can be returned within 7 days. Once an atomiser has been sprayed we cannot resell it, so opened decants are final sale — which is the honest trade-off for buying a 5ml or 10ml instead of committing to a full bottle.
- Do you offer refills?
- Yes. Send back an empty atomiser from any order and the refill costs less than a new decant. Include it with your next order.