Sneaky Harry Potter Detail Reveals the Hilarious Source of Dumbledore's Memory Bottles

Summary:

• Albus Dumbledore heavily relied on the Pensive, the artifact that allowed him to rewatch his and others’ memories at any time.
• The Headmaster’s large collection of memories was stored in dozens of tiny fancy bottles in his study.
• As shown in The Half-Blood Prince, those bottles came from an unnamed Muggle cosmetic shop in London.

In Harry Potter, the Wizarding World is deeply intertwined with the Muggle world, no matter how strongly Pure-Blooded fanatics would object to such a notion. While the Muggles could definitely exist without their wizarding counterparts, it doesn’t work the other way around: wizards have always deeply depended on the commoners.

Apparently, even the all-powerful Albus Dumbledore relied on Muggle cosmetics to perform some of his most important tasks, as revealed in The Half-Blood Prince.

Memories Were Dumbledore’s Most Powerful Tool

While largely praised as the mightiest wizard of his generation and even beyond it, Albus Dumbledore didn’t rely too much on his magic skills. The Hogwarts Headmaster has always been much more of a strategic mastermind than a heroic battlemage, and he preferred using his wits to deal with problems and enemies alike.

For instance, Dumbledore’s most useful and, consequently, powerful tool was not the Elder Wand he’d been wielding for many decades but the Pensieve.

Thanks to the Pensieve, the Hogwarts Headmaster could harvest much more information than through other means: he rewatched his own memories time and time again, and collected others’ memories, as well. That was how he unveiled Lord Voldemort’s darkest secret, and that was also how he prepared Harry for the war.

Dumbledore Bought Muggle Cosmetics in Bulk

Due to his frequent and arguably out-of-hand use of his and others’ memories, Albus Dumbledore needed to store them somewhere — and he had quite a library of those. Rows upon rows of tiny fancy bottles signed by his hand allowed the Headmaster to easily access any memory he wanted to rewatch at any given second, but hey.

Where did all those bottles come from?

This doesn’t sound like an important question at all, but that’s only because it isn’t. The answer to it, however, is genuinely hilarious. The source of Dumbledore’s tiny bottle collection is revealed in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. When the Headmaster picks Harry up at the start of the movie, they are in the Muggle world.

And in one of the shots, they’re standing in front of a promotional banner that features a Muggle cosmetic ad — with a bottle that looks suspiciously familiar!

That’s right: the all-powerful Albus Dumbledore heavily relied on the Muggle cosmetic shop to get the fancy little bottles he later used to store the deepest and darkest secrets of his and others’ pasts, as well as the cheat codes to defeating some notorious wizarding psycho terrorists. Now that’s proper marketing!

Source: Reddit