That’s really nice. The Crown Perfumery Company produced some lovely bottles and you could also buy them with a silver sleeve having a chased or filigree design. That particular cylindrical bottle with a wide neck wasn’t for perfume as such though. It was for what was known as “Lavender Salts”… a mixture of ammonium carbonate and essential oil of lavender used for room or confined space fragrancing and personal invigoration. Ammonium carbonate had long been used for smelling salts but on its own smells vile, so it was combined with lavender oil to offset this. After it lost its fragrance, you could buy neat lavender oil to top it up again.
It may be Victorian or later and there should be mould marks on the bottom which enable a more precise date. William Sparks Thomson of New York founded the Crown Perfumery Company of London in 1872 and registered the trademark for Crown Lavender Salts in the US in 1887, with a statement that the name had been in use since March 1, 1885.
Since the Crown Perfumery company, of London, first brought out its now famous Lavender Salts the entire feminine world has come to look upon them not so much as a luxury as they are a luxurious necessity. Apart from their use in the boudoir, the exquisite perfume which these salts give off when opened in a room has brought them prominently forward as atmospheric perfumers. [from a feature dated January 15, 1894]
The product saw use in the boudoir, in stuffy drawing rooms and a portable version of the bottle was used by travellers in railway carriages, ship’s cabins and even by physicians in hospitals. It was also popular for relieving headaches, dizziness and fainting spells… particularly by ladies succumbing to the effects of tightly-laced corsets and excessive layers of crinoline.
The Amelia Earhart Collection at Purdue University has a Crown Lavender Salts bottle “probably used by Earhart to stay awake during her 1932 solo flight across the Atlantic.” She apparently had sinus problems that created fatigue and used the salts to maintain her alertness when flying.
