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Jan 30, 2024

We're smelling a trend in DIY perfumes

A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Le Labo facilitates customized fragrances. The reference to Le Labo has been removed. Roxanne Lunsford can still smell her baby shower —

A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Le Labo facilitates customized fragrances. The reference to Le Labo has been removed.

Roxanne Lunsford can still smell her baby shower — violet, freesia, amber and musk — and not just from memory. The smell is sitting in a glass bottle on her vanity for whenever she wants a whiff of memory.

Lunsford didn’t want to give her shower guests “a cheesy gift that people wouldn’t use.” So she combed through TikTok and Google for unique party-favor ideas, and found a perfumery in Columbia, Md., that would create a custom scent for her event. Lunsford filled out a questionnaire about her favorite fragrances, participated in at-home trials of different scent bases, and worked with the perfumery, B Parfums, to settle on the bouquet. At the shower, B Parfums had a “bar” where each guest — equipped with a travel-sized version of their “Bonjour Bebe” base — could add various top notes to the fragrance to make it their own. The partygoers loved it, and Lunsford got to keep a full-sized bottle of the fragrance, which she is hesitant to use because she wants to preserve it, and the memory, forever.

“It means the world to me because we almost were not able to have a baby, and we were told it probably wouldn’t happen naturally, and then it did,” Lunsford says. “It means a lot to my guests. Even to this day, some people contact me and talk about how they really did enjoy making their own fragrance.”

As clothing and cosmetics have become increasingly personalized, in an era of ultra-unique fashion, so too has fragrance. Many perfumeries now create bespoke scents, or guide clients through perfume-making sessions.

After all, why smell vaguely sweet or faintly floral when you could smell like the memory of being wrapped in a warm, clean towel after a day at the beach, or your baby shower or, most importantly, yourself?

Bontu Itana, the owner of B Parfums, got into custom fragrances during a distinctly scent-starved time: the isolation of quarantine. Itana, who created Lunsford’s baby-shower scent, was working a government job before the covid pandemic hit. She had a passion for fragrance since she was given her first bottle of perfume at age 12.

“I was the one girl who came to school smelling like Versace instead of Bath and Body Works,” she says.

She had been writing a perfume blog when the world went remote, and then decided to take up scent-making as a profession. She enrolled in perfuming classes online with materials shipped to her from France. One night, months later, she invited her friends over so she could customize perfumes for each of them, and began teaching them how to make their own. That girls night was the inspiration for B Parfums.

The desire for a custom scent is fed by an eagerness for exclusivity, Itana says.

Customers say “‘I don’t want to smell like anybody else, and I want people to be confused and not be able to pinpoint what’s in my smell,’” Itana says. “So it’s not only wanting to smell different, but wanting to have a unique combination of smells in their fragrance, too.”

When you walk into DIY Scent Studio, which is nestled off Main Street in Fairfax City, Va., you’re greeted by a wall of scent. The storefront smells lovely, to be sure, but because of the variety of perfume ingredients, it also smells like everything. Next, you’ll notice the rainbow of perfume materials themselves: more than 500 of them, according to owner Sherry Meredith — all in brown glass bottles, color-coded based on scent family and labeled with a “B” for base note, “M” for middle note or “T” for top note.

Meredith’s self-declared “addiction” to high-quality fragrances that she encountered while traveling led her to take perfuming classes, where she learned about an array of natural and synthetic fragrances and the science behind them. She continued to take classes after graduating and opened DIY Scent Studio in 2016, where she also teaches the art of scent-making.

Meredith walks clients through each of the 90 scents in the “organ,” which is like a desk organizer full of vials. She then allows them to sniff and experiment — giving advice along the way — until they find a combination they love. She compares creating a scent to painting: It’s important to have an image or goal in mind, and to be strategic about the scents used to achieve it.

Like Meredith, Itana teaches individuals and parties how to make their own scents, guiding them through the chemistry of top, middle and base notes and what fragrances complement each other. She also takes commissions for custom scents for individuals who may not want to get their hands smelly. This process involves a consultation, after which Itana formulates assorted scents for them to try, and asks questions like “Would they prefer a sharper or powderier fragrance?” She adds and edits to bring forward the client’s favorite elements.

Why your hotel smells the way it does

Both Meredith’s and Itana’s businesses also work private events and lead team-building exercises centered on fragrance creation. Meredith has led forensics classes through the world of scent, focusing on the science of the art form. For businesspeople, she emphasizes the goal-setting aspect of scent creation. Because olfactory memory is so powerful, guests can build their own signature scents with predetermined notes that will permanently link them to an event, as Lunsford’s fragrance does to her baby shower.

Scent allows our brain to “directly touch the outside world,” says Patric Rhys, a perfume copywriter and freelance fragrance journalist. “If I breathe in, the actual molecules are going up in the air up in my nose, getting on my olfactory bulbs directly … and my brain is lighting them up before I can think about it. It’s just so visceral.”

Meredith and Itana both found that many people watched YouTube and TikTok videos about how to make their own fragrances while isolating at home, and others, like Itana, began taking courses as a result.

Once Virginia dropped its mask mandate, Meredith saw increased interest in the studio. She finds that people enjoy testing different scents just as much as they enjoy having an object to take home.

“We’re not just a perfume studio,” she says. “We focus on experiences. People come in and make it the experience of smelling and enjoying things that they’ve never smelled before.”

Part of the personal fragrance fervor also comes from the rise of perfume content creators on social media, which is another product of the pandemic. Maiya Nicole used to work in the perfume section at a department store, but now makes TikTok and YouTube videos about fragrance and beauty. She has seen the concurrent rise of her platform (@blackgirlssmellgood) and of people’s interest in personalized perfume. Nicole finds that niche and custom perfumery is still popular mostly among “fragrance nerds,” but she foresees it expanding into big-box stores soon. She visualizes a bar where you can work with an existing base into which you can add your own personalized notes of fragrance, which some brands are already doing on a small scale.

To Patric Rhys, the magic of fragrance comes from its primal relationship to human consciousness and its power to foster connection.

“I got into perfume because it’s a composed story for your nose,” Rhys says. “A really great way to feel connected is to take part in a story.”

“I love to see how people approach it, and you learn a lot about people,” says Meredith. “People learn more about themselves by smelling … They discover things that they thought they would never like.”