Making Your Own Custom Perfume in Seoul

When you enter .NOTE they will ask you what language you speak because they offer the course in 13 foreign languages; the primary language is Korean but English, Chinese, Japanese, German, Russian, Malay, Mongolian, Vietnamese, Spanish, Italian, Indonesian, Thai, and French are offered. You start by watching a video tutorial that is self-paced and educational explaining how perfume works. It teaches you things like what top, middle, and base fragrance notes are, why they are important, and how they change the smell of perfume.

At specific intervals in the course, the video will pause giving you time to smell a variety of notes helping to discover how different fragrances blend by sampling various scent families. After studying a little about smells you get to experience over 60 scents to help narrow down your individual preferences. At this point, you pick the fragrances you like and you get to make a sample. 

You start by adding one drop of each and if one fragrance is too strong then you can adjust it to make your perfect blend. You do this about three times to get the fragrance that you like. It becomes a bit of a science experiment balancing out the fragrances until they are perfectly satisfying. At this point, the staff feeds your recipe into the computer to give you the perfect combination to replicate the fragrance you’ve created. After you finish making your perfume they will add rich oils to the bottle to balance it perfectly. You can use your perfume right away but, they tell you that if you wait one week the smell will get even better. 

I visited the Gangnam location. They did have an employee, but the video did most of the teaching. The staff was there to help if I needed it but it was very individualized, making it a personalized, custom experience. When I finished my formula, I chose a name for my scent. They printed a custom label for me and I got to bottle my very own perfume. The studio was kept sanitary with the staff cleaning the bottles and all of the glasses that we used along with the earbuds, the iPad, and the table.