Celine date code checker, find the week and year

Take the four digits at the end and read them out of order. The 2nd and 4th digits are the year and the 1st and 3rd are the week of that year. F-SL-2241 is week 24 of 2021, and a worked example from professional reference material, U-LM-0271, is week 7 of 2021. It is the same skip-reading Louis Vuitton uses, which is why so many people read it left to right and get a nonsense date.

References disagree, so the checker shows both. One professional reference says Celine only started counting weeks in the second half of 2014 and that earlier codes give the month: it photographs W-PA-0163 and dates it June 2013, and several published guides say the same. Other guides read every Celine code as a week, and one of them dates S-PA-0122 to the second week of 2012. The year is not in question, only the two digits beside it. A receipt, the season you bought it, or when the model came out usually settles it.

On a bag it is heat stamped inside, either straight into the leather lining or a pocket wall, or onto a small leather tab sewn into an inner pocket. The tab is often the colour of the outside of the bag, not the lining. On wallets and card holders look inside a card slot or the coin pocket. Shoes, sunglasses and clothing carry no documented date code.

Nobody has published a reliable answer. Guides call the two letter pair a factory or location code, and the single letter before it is described as unknown; common ones on genuine bags include S, F, U and W. None of the professional references we use maps them to a place, so the checker reads the date and leaves the letters alone rather than guess a factory.

Either works, or type both and the checker dates the piece from the top line. A professional reference says one row or two rows are both normal, and published guides say the top line is when production started and the bottom line when it finished. On that reference's two genuine two line stamps the second line reads two to four weeks after the first, which fits.

No to both. It is a date code shared by every bag stamped that week, so it cannot be looked up or registered. And a valid reading proves nothing on its own: professional reference material shows counterfeit stamps such as W-CU-3109 that decode to a perfectly sensible week 30 of 2019 and still fail, because the letters and digits are the wrong shape. Authenticators look at the depth, spacing and typeface of the stamp far more than at what it says.

Roughly when the piece was made. Celine dropped the accent from its logo in September 2018, so stamps reading CÉLINE belong to earlier pieces and CELINE to later ones. Pieces from around the change can carry either, so a 2018 or 2019 code with an accented stamp is ordinary. An accented stamp on a bag the date code places in, say, 2022 is a reason to look closer.

Usually one of four things. A misread digit: 0 and 8, 1 and 7, and 3 and 8 are easy to confuse in a pressed stamp, so photograph it in raking light. An older piece: before about 2009 Céline used short markings like CE00/15 or M93, which have no published key. A misprint: a professional reference says some genuine codes were stamped wrongly and cannot be read by the rule. Or a guide's shortcut: some sites read 0616 as week 6 of 2016 in plain order, but that rests on one unphotographed example and the professional references never use it, so we do not.