How To Create A Perfume
I have always dreamt about creating perfumes. I am in love with the fusion of creativity, science, body, and mind. I love the unexpected scents and I believe there’s no bigger compliment than someone telling you that they love the way you smell, and if they dare, they will go ahead and ask for the perfume you are wearing.
So today, the planets aligned so I could attend a 90-minute perfume workshop at L’atelier, inside the Grand Hyatt in Nusa Dua.
I feel like I did a lot of talking, gushing over my favourite perfumes and their marketing activations such as Dyptique’s pop-up store in Berlin (that became a permanent store, yey!), or packaging like Loewe’s minimal packaging or the buying experience at a Le Labo store. Windy the teacher, listened patiently through my interruptions. I told her about my perfume, Thé Noir by Le Labo, and how, I actually don’t like how it smells initially, it’s too strong, but somehow I love how it smells hours later and how the smell changes even the day after when it’s still in my clothes. She then explained to me the reason for this: There are three layers
in perfume: The top notes, that first smell of a perfume that at times feels like a punch. She then proceeded to explain to me “the journey” of a perfume (Ah, this was so poetic I felt like I was floating) How you go, from the top notes to the heart notes, and finally to the base notes- those last ones are the final smell that stays in you for hours or even days like my perfume.
She proceeded with handing me a questionnaire to nail down my scent preferences since there were many ingredients in “the organ”, a reference borrowed from music due to the shape of the tray where the ingredients are placed. The top notes are placed all the way at the top, the strong “punch-like” smell. She told me that you shouldn’t judge a perfume by its first smell since the molecules of these scents are lighter and will fade away within the first hour. Then the “heart notes” start to magically appear after leaving the top notes behind. These were predominantly what I was smelling, the base notes would appear a few hours later- in my case, leaving a clean white musk smell on my skin.
The “organ”
After narrowing down the ingredients, I proceeded to smell them. I got teary when I smelled the “rosemary” and “rose” scents, I was surprised by this since it was an almost immediate reaction, it brought me directly home and to my grandma’s garden and we talked a little about how smell is the strongest sense tied to memory and how it’s common that this can happen, it caught me off guard. After smelling pretty much every scent, I end up making my selection:
Top notes: Citrus Cologne, Rosemary, and Bergamot
Middle notes: Fig Fruit and Nutmeg
Base notes: Oud and White Musk
My first trial also included Frangipani for the sake of Bli but it smelled too fruity and floral for me. I needed something more “city-like”, something that evoked future and something unisex (I love unisex perfumes) So we got rid of the frangipani in the end. I had three trials, playing around with adding and subtracting drops from different ingredients until I came up
with the formula for my perfume. Now I understand why it was a 90-minute workshop, I could have probably sat there for hours until I came up with the right formula - which of course made me think of the real perfume makers and how subtle and complex, creating a new perfume must be.
Once I had the final recipe, she asked me to name the perfume in order to create the label. How dare do they ask me to name my first perfume in one minute? (my branding experience peeking through hah), I failed under the time pressure and came up with the very corny name “Unique” (or as Kevin rebranded it later “Eunuch”) since it was a word that came up a lot during my creation process.
And with that, they printed a label and I made my first perfume. It was so fun, I told them that that felt way better than a spa session and that it was not going to be my last workshop. Maybe I have tapped on a future career venture, who knows?
