A glass bottle keeps nothing of what it held. Pour out the oil, rinse it, and the bottle remembers neither the oil nor the scent. A wooden box is the opposite kind of vessel. Keep spices in it for a year and it will hold their smell long after the spices are gone, and it will lend that smell to whatever you put in next.
This difference has a name, and the name is porosity. Most of what we believe about which material suits which substance comes down to it, though we tend to dress the reasoning up as a matter of taste.
A surface, or a sponge
Glass is non-porous. So is glazed ceramic, the glaze is a thin layer of glass fused to the clay body in the kiln, sealing a surface that would otherwise drink whatever touched it. Run your thumb across a glazed bowl and the smoothness you feel is a closed door. Nothing passes through it. Oil sits on top, scent sits on top, water sits on top, and all of it wipes away.
Unglazed stone is different. So is terracotta, raw wood, unfinished concrete. These materials are full of channels too small to see, and those channels pull liquid in by capillary action and hold it. A porous surface is not a barrier but a sponge with a slow appetite. It absorbs, and having absorbed, it transfers, which is why an old wooden chopping board carries the ghost of every onion, and why a clay cup used for coffee will, over months, taste faintly of coffee even when filled with water.
Neither property is a virtue. Each is simply a fact about what the material does. The question is only ever which fact you want.
Oil wants glass
Oil is the clearest case. A scented oil, a perfume, an essential oil, anything where the whole point is the smell, wants a non-porous vessel. Put it in glass and the glass holds it indifferently, gives nothing back, lets the oil leave exactly as it arrived. Put the same oil in unglazed stone and the stone will drink it, keep it, and slowly go rancid in its own pores, because oil oxidises and the absorbed oil cannot be rinsed out. This is why perfume has always lived in glass. Not for elegance, though glass is elegant. For indifference. The bottle must have no opinion about its contents.
Scent follows the same logic. A fragrance stored in porous material loses its top notes to the walls of its own container and gains, in exchange, whatever was there before. Glass keeps a scent honest.
A bar of soap wants the opposite
Soap inverts the problem, and this is where it gets interesting.
A bar of soap is not stored, it is used, wetted, set down wet, and used again. Its enemy is standing water. A bar left in a shallow pool of its own runoff softens, swells, and dissolves from the bottom up, and a non-porous dish makes this worse, because glass and glazed ceramic shed nothing. Water collects. The bar sits in it.
So a draining soap wants a surface that lets water leave, a ridged dish, a slatted rest, or a porous material that takes the moisture away into itself and releases it slowly to the air. Unglazed stone, the very material that ruins an oil, suits a bar of soap. The pores that would absorb and hold a fragrance instead absorb and disperse water, keeping the underside of the bar dry between uses. The bar lasts longer. The thing that makes a material wrong for one substance makes it right for another.
This is the quiet point. There is no general hierarchy of good materials and lesser ones. There is only the pairing, this substance, that surface, and the pairing is decided almost entirely by physics that happen to also be beautiful.
We like to think we choose vessels by taste. We choose the heavy glass because it feels considered, the unglazed dish because it feels honest. But run the reasoning to the bottom and taste turns out to be function wearing better clothes. The glass we find beautiful for an oil is beautiful in part because it works. The stone we find honest under a bar of soap is honest because it drains.
What holds a thing well, we tend to find handsome. The eye was agreeing with the physics all along.