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The Specter Of EVAPORATION - Or Better - The Angel's Share
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Every minibottle collector knows about
the specter of EVAPORATION!
We buy beautiful bottles with nice contents and years later the contents have partially gone
and only the nearly empty miniature bottle is left.
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But how can we avoid this horrible evaporation process?
Unfortunately to say but there is no general method to do that.
We can try to slow up the evaporation process but anyhow it will happen that some of our beautiful collecting
miniature bottles will leave their contents over the years. But some hints will follow ...
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The evaporation process normally causes in a few reasons:
[ 1 ]
The minibottle material: In my observation plastic minibottles have a much higher evaporation
potential than glass bottles, colored glass minibottles have lower potential than clear minibottles.
[ 2 ]
The minibottle closure type: Minibottles have different kind of closures like cork stoppers,
clip stoppers (tear off) or screw caps (twist off) with or without spring rings made of metal or plastic.
[ 3 ]
The minibottle storage: This should be a cold(er) room with a temperature of about 18 degrees Celsius
(about 0 ° Fahrenheit) and if possible the bottles should not be placed in the direct sunlight.
Unfortunately nowadays minibottles are often only made of plastic (PET), glass minibottles
are not longer available but in the worst case minibottles are discontinued in production :-(
An example is the Beam Distilling Company (USA), here you can see (from left to right):
glass bottle / tear off, glass / PET screw with shrink cap, glass / screw with spring ring,
glass / screw, glass / PET screw with spring ring, 2 x PET / PET screw with spring ring.
The two plastic bottles on the right are currently available miniature bottles from Beam.
In my opinion the best minibottle collectibles are made of brown glass with metal screw caps.
But you seldom will have the great chance to select between the options - you will have to take
what you can get your hands on ;-)
So how can we avoid evaporation?
How can we preserve the minibottle contents?
[ 1 ]
Buy glass miniature bottles whenever you're able to, perhaps check for older releases!
[ 2 ]
If your minibottle has a screw cap you should close it as well as possible,
because some of the screw caps are not well tightened when produced.
Be careful not to overwind the screw winding!
[ 3 ]
After all that you can try to seal the closure in many variants. Some examples are:
| |
candle
wax |
sealing
wax |
finish /
lacquer |
nail
polish |
adhesive
tape |
adhesive
glue |
shrink
caps |
| Appliance |
pretty
easy |
difficult |
quite
easy |
easy |
very
easy |
pretty
easy |
easy |
| Effect |
good |
perfect |
perfect |
good |
none |
none |
none |
| Comment |
gets
crumbly |
only
colored |
very thin,
use twice |
- |
- |
- |
- |
| Reversal |
difficult |
impossible |
impossible |
impossible |
difficult |
difficult |
very easy |
And here is what I do against the specter of evaporation:
My favorate sealing for screw caps is a stretchable laboratory film called "PARAFILM M":
 
"Parafilm M" is very easy to use, easy to remove if necessarry, transparent and non toxic.
Sometimes I combine "Parafilm M" with heat shrink caps (please refer above on the right).
Some examples from left to right: no seal, Parafilm, shrink cap, Parafilm plus shrink cap.
As you can see the sealing is nearly transparent and - in my opinion - it is very effective!
And if it is not working, I think it's fair to share some of the contents with the Angels ;-)
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