As promised, here are the two bottles I picked up from Scandinavia that were just too pretty to leave behind. Bottle collectors wax poetic when describing the shades of colors of their bottles; personally, I'm a novice at such things, but I'd call the Oxygenol bottle "honey-amber" and the beer bottle "teal". When I was in the Swedish antique shop admiring the sun passing through these two bottles in the window, I could hear them cooing to me, "Buy us. Bring us home." How could I resist? They are now in my south Texas window, muttering, "Haftigt! (Wow! in Swedish) It's so hot here - take us back to Sweden!" Sorry my beauties, but you're all mine now! The best I've been able to uncover so far about Oxygenol is that it was hydrogen peroxide, used in the 1890s and 1900s as a dental disinfectant. Perhaps somebody from Sweden can shed some light on it. I do notice that there is an Oxygenol company in Sweden today, making tubes of toothpaste.
The teal bottle probably contained the most favored form of Swedish medicine ... booze! Apparently used as both a cure-all and a preventative, from what I observed when I was over there!
By the way, I added a comment to the previous post about the Ether and Turpentine bottle pictured. Nicholas and I did some interesting research and I think we came up with what its intended use was; please check it out (click on the Comments to September 11 posting).
Posts
