How Decanting Works
A decant is not a copy, a clone, or an "inspired by" fragrance. It is the exact same liquid as the retail bottle — measured out of that bottle and into a smaller one, so you can wear a fragrance properly before spending €150 or more on it.
This page explains precisely how that happens at Neoteriko: where the bottles come from, what we do to them, what we do not do to them, and how you can check our work.
Where the fragrance comes from
We buy full-size, factory-sealed retail bottles from authorised European retailers and official brand channels — the same places you would buy them yourself. We pay full retail or wholesale price for those bottles. There is no secret supply chain, no grey-market importer, no "tester" stock of uncertain origin.
This is the single most important fact about our business, and it is also the reason our prices work the way they do. We are not cheaper because the fragrance is inferior. We are cheaper because you are buying 5ml instead of 100ml.
Reselling genuine fragrance is legal in the EU. Under the principle of trademark exhaustion, once a brand sells a bottle within the European Economic Area, it cannot control the resale of that specific bottle. We buy genuine goods and resell the genuine contents, described honestly as decants.
Neoteriko is an independent reseller. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or a distributor for any of the fragrance houses whose products we decant. Every brand name on this site belongs to its respective owner and is used descriptively, to tell you what is in the bottle.
How a decant is made
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The retail bottle is opened
A sealed bottle is unboxed and its batch code recorded against our stock log, so every decant can be traced back to the specific retail bottle it came from.
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The fragrance is transferred directly
The fragrance is transferred from the retail bottle into sterile glass atomizers using dedicated equipment. Nothing is added. No alcohol, no water, no fixative, no carrier oil. What leaves the retail bottle is what enters your decant.
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Each vial is filled, capped and sealed
Vials are filled to their stated volume — 2ml, 5ml or 8ml — capped, and sealed. The seal is your assurance that nobody has opened the vial between our bench and your door.
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The label and batch code are applied
Every decant is labelled with the fragrance name, the house, the volume, and a unique Neoteriko batch code encoding the week it was filled.
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It is packed and shipped
Decants are packed protectively and dispatched with tracked delivery. Orders placed before 3pm CET are filled and shipped the same day.
What we never do
We never dilute
Nothing is added to stretch a bottle further. A 5ml decant contains 5ml of the fragrance exactly as the house made it.
We never use clones
No "inspired by" oils, no dupes, no generic bases. If the label says Xerjoff, the liquid came out of a Xerjoff bottle.
We never refill a used vial
Every atomizer is new and sterile. Vials are not recovered, washed, or reused between customers.
We never resell a returned decant
Once a hygiene seal is broken, that decant is out of circulation permanently. It is never repackaged or resold.
Your batch code, and what it tells you
Every Neoteriko decant carries a batch code in the format NK-YYWW-NNNC printed on its label.
| NK | Identifies the code as ours |
|---|---|
| YY | The year the decant was filled (26 = 2026) |
| WW | The ISO week number it was filled in |
| NNN | The fill sequence within that week |
| C | A check character, calculated from the digits before it |
That last character is what makes the code verifiable rather than decorative. It is derived mathematically from the rest of the code, so a code that is mistyped — or invented — will fail verification instead of quietly appearing valid.
You can check any code yourself, right now:
Being straight with you about what the checker proves
The batch code checker confirms that a code is genuinely formatted and internally consistent, and it decodes the week that decant was filled. It is a strong check against typos and invented codes.
It does not, on its own, prove that a physical bottle in your hand came from us — no public tool can do that, and any company claiming otherwise is overselling. If a code fails, or if anything about a product you received seems wrong, email us and we will check it against our fill log directly and personally.
How long a decant lasts
We put an 18-month freshness window on our decants, measured from the week they were filled. This is deliberately conservative. Most fragrances remain perfectly wearable well beyond that, and a decant past its window is not spoiled — but citrus and other volatile top notes are the first to drift, and we would rather under-promise.
To get the most from yours: keep it away from direct sunlight, away from radiators and bathroom steam, and capped when not in use. Heat and light degrade fragrance far faster than time alone.
Why decants at all
A full bottle is a real commitment. Fragrance behaves differently on different skin, in different weather, at different times of day — and a thirty-second spray on a paper strip in a shop tells you almost nothing about how something wears over eight hours.
A decant gives you the real thing at a real size, for a fraction of the cost. Some people use us to test before buying a full bottle. Others prefer never to own a full bottle at all, and instead keep a rotating handful of 8ml atomizers. Both are entirely reasonable ways to wear fragrance.
Still have a question we have not answered here? Get in touch — a person reads every message.