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Years ago, when I was still a member of the "fragcomm" on Basenotes, I debated the merits of seeking, collecting, and wearing "vintage" fragrances. At that time (between 2011 and 2017), the majority view held that "vintage," i.e., anything released years before as an early-specimen formula of something long since discontinued or reformulated, was simply better, and worth seeking out. For example, if you wanted a bottle of Lapidus Pour Homme, it was trivial unless you sought a marbled glass bottle with an intense blast of animalic honey in its heart. The "reform" wasn't worth having.
As you can imagine, this logic has its problems. Fragrance, like all things, is subject to the thermodynamic law of entropy, and it does eventually spoil. How quickly and noticeably that spoilage occurs is widely variable, and invites speculation as to what constitutes "spoilage." My position then, as now, is that any perfume will spoil, and its usability diverts into one of two outcomes; it might lose clarity with top notes vanishing, heart notes blurring into each other, and base notes droning on forever, or it may simply smell foul.
I find that most perfumes will lose their note fidelity, but maintain wearability, i.e., they will still smell good. I own several vintage bottles, like my Grey Flannel, which is now several decades old, yet is still perfectly wearable, even if it clearly smells a bit too "smooth" and "soft" to qualify as an accurate match for what is currently being sold by EA. So if the fear is that vintage fragrances are useless, fear not! Many vintages that are preserved in any measure will maintain a recognizable profile, and perform adequately for daily wear, and some may even perform better than their modern versions do.
At odds with all of this is the phenomenon of "in-bottle maceration." In terms of its applicability to the vintage spoilage debate, post-sale maceration is its own argument, with many experienced community members doubting it exists. I know of at least two veterans out there with extensive knowledge of perfumes who contest that "in-bottle maceration," i.e., the chemical maturation of a perfume after it has been bottled and sold, does not exist. Their contention is that maceration is a process limited to the manufacture of a perfume, and that once the stuff is bottled and shipped, the process is long finished.
Herein lies the rub: I agree with them, almost entirely. Almost entirely. There are some exceptions, however, and in my experience they are limited to three brands: Creed, Yves Saint-Laurent, and Armaf. Pre-BlackRock Creeds, from the family-owned company that still used a smidgen of real ambergris in their bases, would smell super weak initially, and were borderline useless if you tried to wear them right after purchase. But I discovered that if I used the fragrances just enough to introduce air into their bottles, and then let them sit for six months or a year, they would smell richer, deeper, and much, much stronger when I got around to them again. Ditto for YSL's Kouros (silver-shouldered), and also true for Armaf's Club de Nuit Milestone, which took about two years to open up.
I hold though that in-bottle maceration is a confounding factor to the idea that fragrances get better with age. The problem with assuming that vintages are simply better macerated is that the maceration process signifies an "arc" of development, with a distinct start point (weak juice), mid-phase (best life), and end point (spoilage). With pre-BlackRock Creeds, the key is catching them in the mid-phase of their development, which can last several years, and can end up being incredibly rewarding if you only wear them a few times a year. Stretch things for too long, however, and some Creeds will spoil. Green Valley is one that I once encountered in its full spoilage stage. It smelled like sour citrus in the top for about fifteen seconds, and thereafter smelled of dirty shoe leather.
With this in mind, what about the idea of "aging" our fragrances? First, let me describe what I mean by "aging." The aging process of anything suggests a linear path instead of an arc: a product starts as "immature," and improves over time, until it has reached "peak" maturity, wherein it remains pristine for an indefinite period, or until used. By nature, the product changes for the better, and once that change is complete, it simply maintains, with little to no deterioration. Aging is successful in the realm of wines, cheeses, cured meats, and other edible/ingestible products, but it is not often used by fragrance enthusiasts.
One of the key problems with the notion of "aging" a perfume is that it suggests the perfume needs to be aged to begin with. No wine connoisseur worth his salt will take a freshly-bottled fine wine and crack it open the next day, because aging is necessary for it to reach an apex in quality. It could take twenty, thirty, forty years for the wine to develop its full range of flavors and nuances. The same cannot be said of perfumes, which are largely ready to go from the factory. If you buy a new-batch bottle of Nautica Voyage on Monday, you can and should wear it on Monday. There is little to no benefit in waiting twenty years to depress the atomizer for the first time, as it will, at best, smell the same as it did the day you bought it. So where does that leave the idea of "aging?"
To me, it leaves it in the same place as in-bottle maceration. Where the maceration phenomenon only occurs with certain fragrances from specific brands, the idea of aging a perfume also applies only to certain fragrances. Interestingly, my experience with aging a perfume is only noteworthy with one fragrance: Brut. In my experience, Brut ages like fine wine. Fitting, given its name! Brut, when new, smells very good, but it smells a bit too polished and "fresh." To understand what I mean, consider what Brut used to be in the seventies and eighties: an incredibly beautiful accord of fresh green notes atop an animalic, ambery musk. A splash would unfurl a series of bright citrus and herbal notes, which gradually dried into a deep, warm, musky tonka base that carried a vague whiff of unwashed skin (musk ambrette).
In my possession is a bottle of Helen of Troy's aftershave formula from 2010. I used most of it, but saved a little on the bottom. In the last fourteen years, I've noticed something: the musk has grown raunchier. It hasn't adopted the full-throated amber of its earlier iterations, but it has definitely grown richer and more nuanced. It smells closer to vintage Faberge Brut than it did when I bought it. This has me thinking that the thing to do with Brut is buy it and hold on to it for a decade or two before using it. If I purchase Brut and I'm dissatisfied with how it smells in comparison to the vintage stuff, maybe I need to let my bottle become "vintage" before using it!
I have other bottles that exhibit a similar shift in the way the musks smell, and Brut is a very musky fragrance. In fact, I think Brut is really just a big pile of aromatic musks, with little else involved. But there's a problem with applying the Brut principle to other perfumes. Just because Brut seems to get better with age, doesn't mean everything will enjoy the same outcome. Sure, things may improve to a modest degree, but eventually the majority of fragrances out there will probably lose their luster. So where does that leave me? I know that out of 150 perfumes in my collection, exactly one of them actually "ages" itself into a more mature and beautiful form after a decade of storage. It happens to be one of the muskiest fragrances in my collection, and it also happens to be a stylistic antique, having been released sixty years ago (scary, the Jet Age is antique now).
With this knowledge, I go forward wondering if other musky fragrances will also improve with age. Musks are very large and complex molecules, and their chemical interaction with these fragrance formulas may, over extended periods of time, yield results that are favorable to the nose. In closing, I'll mention that I find it interesting that newer bottles of Brut have aged into smelling more like vintage bottles. It makes me wonder if 1960s Brut, when new, smelled the same as the fresh stuff does today. What difference is there between how a man in 1964 smelled, and a "Brut Man" smells today? It's entirely possible that in a side-by-side comparison, they would smell identical!