Inter Parfums Batch Codes: Year Letter + Julian Day

Montblanc, Jimmy Choo, Coach, Van Cleef & Arpels, Boucheron, Karl Lagerfeld, Kate Spade, Ferragamo, Moncler, Guess, Abercrombie & Fitch and Dunhill have nothing in common as fashion houses. They have everything in common as fragrances: Inter Parfums holds the licence and manufactures all of them.

That is the single most useful fact about batch codes generally. The format follows the factory, not the logo on the bottle. If you know who actually makes a fragrance, you know how to read its code.

The code runs to about nine characters. The first letter in it is the production year, on an annual cycle that skips I and O — the two letters most easily misread as 1 and 0. That puts J at 2019, K at 2020, L at 2021, M at 2022, N at 2023, P at 2024, Q at 2025 and R at 2026.

The last three digits are the day of that year. Everything in between is internal batch and line reference, and can be ignored.

• Find the first letter. Count from J = 2019 forward, skipping I and O.
• Take the final three digits as the day of the year and convert: divide by 30.4 for a rough month.
• If the final three digits are over 366, this is not the day — on a minority of Inter Parfums codes those digits are a factory line. Treat the result as approximate in that case.

Box base, and on a sticker or direct print on the underside of the bottle. Inter Parfums codes are usually printed in black on the white base sticker and are among the easier fragrance codes to read without a magnifier.