Alkaid Li · personal site · byalkaid.com
Hi, I’m Alkaid. I design and make perfume bottles — the real ones that end up on shelves, and the strange ones that only exist in my head so far. This site is where I keep both, honestly labelled, and tell you what I actually think about each one.
First — the deal with this site
Glass is honest. It shows every shortcut — so I try not to take any.
This front page is the short version of me: two bottles that really exist, three ideas still dreaming, the way I work, and a few things I’ve learned by breaking glass. Everything longer — the full letter, every concept and design study, the whole notebook — lives one click away, on its own page.
Made & delivered. Real bottles from real orders, photographed close up as I made and checked them.
An idea, not a product. Illustrations from my concept lab. Nothing with this label is in production — yet.
From the bench — real production
no renders, no borrowed photos — the bottles themselves, close up ⤵
I designed both of these, held them in my hand and checked them against the light. Here’s the short version of each — the full stories, with everything I learned making them, are on the Real work page.
The brief: black — but not flat, dead black. The liquid had to ghost through when the bottle is held up to light.
What I did: a gradient spray, dense at the shoulder and dissolving before the base, so the thick glass foot stays crystal clear. Several rounds of tuning before the fade line stopped looking like a mistake.
Read the full case →
The brief: colour-shifting bottles — violet from one angle, alive from another — with shelf impact and no printing at all.
What I did: built the tone in thin passes rather than one heavy coat, so the surface stays glassy and the colour deep instead of chalky. The best version was the one where I stopped earlier than felt safe.
Read the full case →From the concept lab
yes, the labels are the point — a concept is a concept until it isn’t ⤵
My open notebook of designs nobody has let me make — yet. Some are buildable tomorrow, some would fight the laws of physics for a while. Steal the feeling, change the shape, come and argue with me about it.
The idea: walls that ripple like water frozen mid-wave. No flat face for a label — the name etched along the spine, read through the ripples.
The idea: brutalist architecture, shrunk to a hand — a matte black block with one corner broken open, raw crystal growing inside.
The idea: a perfect sphere of glass held in a thin brass ring — the ring is the stand, the frame and the handle, all in one line.
How I work
No layers, no account managers — this is the whole process, and I’m all of it. Four moves, in the order they actually happen:
Every bottle starts as pencil lines in my notebook. The first sketch is supposed to be wrong — it exists so there’s something to argue with.
Shape has to live in the glass itself, not be printed on afterwards. I push the silhouette until the mould pushes back — that argument is where a design gets honest.
Screens lie politely. Weight, balance, the feel of the cap — a bottle only tells the truth in your hand, held up to the light.
If I wouldn’t put my name under it, it doesn’t leave. Some designs wait years in the notebook for their moment. That’s fine.
From the notebook
Pick up two bottles with your eyes closed and you’ll rank their prices correctly within seconds. Your hand is the first reviewer your product will ever get — design for it.
Every maker sends their best sample. I tell people to also ask: “show me a bottle you rejected.” What someone throws away tells you exactly what they’ll let out the door.
Finishes cycle every few years; silhouettes last decades. Spend your mould money on a shape that survives trends, and let colour and finish do the seasonal talking.
Maybe your scent still lives in a notebook. Maybe it’s just a feeling you can’t shake — a weight, a colour, a star you keep looking up at. Either way, there’s only one door into my studio, and it opens straight to me.
I read every word myself — no assistants, no inbox theatre ✦
A short letter, instead of a bio
I grew up around molten glass, and I still think it’s the most honest material in packaging. You can hide a lot in plastic. In glass, the weight is either right or it isn’t, the wall is either even or it wobbles, and light will tell on you immediately.
By day I design perfume bottles — and the caps, sprayers and boxes that complete them — for fragrance brands. But this site isn’t a company talking. It’s just me, Alkaid: what I’ve made, what I’m proud of, what I’d do differently, and the designs I haven’t talked anyone into producing yet.
If you’re building a fragrance brand, I hope something here gives you an idea — including the concepts. Steal the feeling, change the shape, come and argue with me about it. That’s my favourite part of the job.
— Alkaid Li
A heavy base says “take me seriously” before a single note is smelled. I’d rather spend glass on the base than money on decoration.
People touch the cap more than the bottle. If the cap feels cheap, no beautiful bottle underneath will save it.
Texture, facets and shape cast into the glass age gracefully. Prints and coatings are fashion — sometimes right, never the foundation.
Selected work — production
the bottles themselves, close up, july ’26 — nothing borrowed, nothing rendered ⤵
Everything in this section physically exists. I designed each piece, held it in my hand and checked it against the light. No renders, no borrowed photos — just the bottles, close up, and what I learned making them.
Made & delivered. Real bottles from real orders, photographed close up as I made and checked them.
An idea, not a product. Illustrations from my concept lab further down. Nothing with this label is in production — yet.
The brief: a client wanted black — but not flat, dead black. They wanted the liquid to ghost through when you hold the bottle up to light.
What I did: a gradient spray, dense at the shoulder and dissolving before the base, so the thick glass foot stays crystal clear. It sounds simple. It took several rounds of spray-density tuning before the fade line stopped looking like a mistake.
What I took from it: a fade is a horizon line. Put it in the wrong place and the whole bottle looks dirty; put it right and people turn the bottle in their hands without knowing why.
The brief: colour-shifting bottles — violet from one angle, alive from another — for a line that needed shelf impact without any printing at all.
What I did: built the tone in thin passes rather than one heavy coat. Thin passes keep the surface glassy and the colour deep instead of chalky.
What I took from it: restraint. The temptation is always one more pass. The best version of this bottle was the one where I stopped earlier than felt safe.
The concept lab — open notebook
if one of these won’t leave your head — that’s the brief. write to me ⤵
These are my concept designs — directions I’m exploring for the next generation of fragrance bottles. Some are buildable tomorrow, some would fight the laws of physics and tooling for a while. All of them are here to give you ideas. Take one for a walk; if it won’t leave your head, talk to me and we’ll find out together how real it can get.
Every piece in this section carries this label, on the card and in the image caption. The visuals are illustrations of the idea — not photos of existing products.
For contrast: this is the label for things that physically exist, in the section above. Two labels, no grey area — that’s the deal on this site.
The idea: a bottle whose walls ripple like water that froze mid-wave. No flat face for a label — the fragrance name would be etched along the spine, read through the ripples.
What it would take: a complex multi-part mould and very patient annealing. Expensive to open, unforgettable on a shelf.
“I keep coming back to this one. Perfume is a liquid pretending to be still — I want a bottle that admits it moves.”
The idea: brutalist architecture, shrunk to a hand. A matte black block with one corner broken open to reveal raw crystal growing inside, and a cap that looks like an uncut stone.
What it would take: the “break” would be sculpted into the mould, not actually broken — controlled chaos, repeatable 10,000 times.
“Most luxury bottles try to look perfect. I want one that looks discovered — like it was dug out of somewhere.”
The idea: a perfect sphere of glass, held inside a thin brass ring — part bottle, part table sculpture. The ring isn’t decoration: it’s the stand, the frame and the handle, all in one line.
What it would take: spheres are easy to blow and hard to fill, seal and ship. The ring solves the standing problem; the rest is engineering I’m still sketching.
“Alkaid is a star — one of the pointers in the Big Dipper that people have navigated by for centuries. Orbit is my quiet little nod to that: a small body, held in a ring, finding its place. It’s where the name on this site comes from.”
The idea: facets with no symmetry at all — every face a different angle, so the bottle throws small rainbows wherever the light is. The bottle does its own advertising, all day, for free.
What it would take: facet depth is limited by wall thickness; push too far and the glass gets fragile. There’s a sweet spot and I intend to find it.
“A shop window is a lighting rig nobody pays for. Design for the light you’ll actually get, not the light in the render.”
The idea: frosted, soft, almost ceramic — then one single brass wire wraps the whole bottle and gathers itself into the cap. Two materials, one gesture, nothing else.
What it would take: the wire is the hard part — fixing it so it never loosens, without a drop of visible glue. A jewellery problem, not a glass problem.
“Not every bottle should shout. This one is for the quiet brands — the ones people discover instead of being sold.”
From my own drawing board
bottle, cap & box — the full outfit, from every angle ⤵
The five above began as illustrations. These three went further: they’re my own design studies, worked out as complete systems — bottle, cap and box together — and rendered from every angle so they can be judged the way real products get judged. They are renders of designs, not photographs of finished bottles, and they carry the same label as everything else in this lab. Turn each one around; the thumbnails are all the same study, seen from different sides.
Study nº 1 — renderFront
The idea: the cap is the sculpture. An oversized shell — polished silver, fanned like a nautilus — swallows half the bottle, so the piece reads as jewellery first and packaging second. Underneath stays deliberately quiet: a flat black bottle, drawn as a 100 ml extrait, with a round medallion where a brand’s mark would live.
What it would take: a cap this size is a casting and balance problem — it has to feel like treasure in the hand, not a lid that fights back. The shell would be cast, polished and weighted; the bottle underneath is the easy part, which is exactly the point.
“Everyone designs the bottle and tolerates the cap. I did this one backwards — and the backwards version was more fun.”
Study nº 2 — renderFront
The idea: a gold sailboat, sails up, riding a stack of gold waves that twist down into the neck of the bottle. The waves aren’t decoration — they’re the collar, the grip and the whole silhouette. Underneath, a plain black cylinder, drawn as a 100 ml extrait, that knows when to keep quiet.
What it would take: stacked waves mean stacked parts — every ring has to sit true or the whole tower leans. Very doable in cast metal with patient tooling, and the sail is one clean casting with no fragile details waiting to snap off in a handbag.
“A boat that never gets wet, carrying a scent that goes everywhere. Some designs you draw because they’d make you smile on a shelf. This is that one.”
Study nº 3 — renderFront
The idea: perfumers talk about “notes” all day — so I wrote some on the bottle. A gold staff wraps a twisted column of teal glass, notes and a treble clef riding the lines, and the cap is a vinyl record: black, grooved, the clef pressed in gold. Two colourways so far — teal and rose.
What it would take: the staff is the hard part — five lines and free-floating notes that have to stay in register all the way around a twist. That’s a foil-and-decal problem with nowhere to hide. The name lettered on these renders is a placeholder, standing where a brand’s would sit.
“Every fragrance is a small piece of music you wear. This one just admits it on the outside.”
Field notes
Short notes from my notebook and from client projects. No corporate voice — just what I’d tell you over tea if you came to visit me.
Pick up two bottles with your eyes closed and you’ll rank their prices correctly within seconds. Your hand is the first reviewer your product will ever get — design for it.
Every maker sends their best sample. I tell people to also ask: “show me a bottle you rejected.” What someone throws away tells you exactly what they’ll let out the door.
Finishes cycle every few years; silhouettes last decades. Spend your mould money on a shape that survives trends, and let colour and finish do the seasonal talking.
Work with me
I work directly with founders and brand teams — no layers, no account managers. Whether you start from a real case above or a concept that won’t leave your head, the way in is the same:
Not the spec sheet — the feeling. Dark or luminous, heavy or floating, loud or quiet. Send references, even from outside perfume. Especially from outside perfume.
I’ll come back with shapes — adapted from ones I’ve made before, or drawn from scratch — plus honest notes on what each one costs you in tooling, time and risk.
Samples you can hold, then the real thing — bottle, cap, sprayer and box, followed through by me personally. You talk to me the whole way through.
Tell me what you’re building — or just tell me which concept you can’t stop thinking about. Both are good ways to start.