very specific recommendations (for decanting).

testing the limits of niche internet interests.

I’ve never encountered a product—beauty, medicinal, food, cleaning, or otherwise—that I wouldn’t happily decant. No bottle is too small, no item too precious, no decanting task too tedious to stop me from shuffling the contents of various bottles or jars or jugs into other bottles or jars or jugs. Stuff in a bag? Let me jar that up for you.

I can’t exactly explain the compulsion, but if you’ve ever showered at my parents’ house and tried to tell the shampoo from the conditioner, some questions would be answered. Certainly there’s a general desire for order and tidiness. There’s a wish to cultivate a cohesive aesthetic apart from whatever the grocery or pharmacy or branding powers that be bestowed upon me. There’s also a permanent reel of Alice Lawson’s store playing in my head every time I buy a bag of sugar. The heart wants what the heart wants, and my heart wants the jars and bottles and grocery items in my life to look vaguely like they came out of a late-19th century general store.

There are also practical reasons for decanting—New York City vermin perhaps most of all. Bulk-bought items need sturdier storage than whatever they were hauled them home in and even boxed and bagged grocery items—crackers, cereals, and Sour Patch Kids—stay fresh a whole lot longer when it’s not left up to the household children to carefully refold and seal shut the plastic bag they came in.

Rest assured, it’s not only food stuffs that get the decanting treatment in this apartment. Boxes of bandaids are emptied into a zippered pouch, bags of cough drops are rehoused in a jam jar, mouthwash and antacids and trash bags meet more pleasing repositories immediately upon entry. Last night, my oldest child came to me grinning because I had slipped her newly purchased sleeve of hair elastics onto a small cardboard rectangle and hung it up with a jaunty scrap of ribbon. She looked at me conspiratorially and said “Can you imagine just leaving the elastics on the packaging from the store? With all the writing all over it?” Nurture or nature? We’ll never know.

There are worse vices than decanting, but one should know that the habit doesn’t come without some risk. Have I already told the saga of James and the Pea Pesto? How in the spring before we got married he worked selling vegetables for a farmer at Union Square and one day came home with an enormous bag of spring peas ready for shelling? How he shelled them all, standing in the very dark corner of our preposterously small apartment kitchen, poured the freshly shelled peas into a blender, added basil and parmesan and several generous glugs of olive oil and whizzed it all up into a puzzlingly frothy pesto? How he realized that instead of reaching for the olive oil, he’d reached for the dish soap? How both viscous liquids were housed in nearly identical upcycled glass bottles on the approximately 10-square-inches of counter space? No? Well. Proceed with caution.

Caveats aside, there are four very specific, very basic, household items that I find to be invaluable to my personal decanting practice. You’ll note there’s nary a vessel on the list because truly the best vessels for decanting are the ones you likely already have: jam jars and kombucha bottles and glass pots free of the remains of fancy face creams.

Without further ado, my list: