Announcements
Introducing Fragrance-Making Workshops at the Gallery of Scent
When we designed the Gallery of Scent, the idea was to make fragrance easier to understand by pulling it apart. Instead of asking visitors to smell a finished perfume and decide whether they like it, we present thirty of the ingredients that fragrances are built from, one at a time. Once you’ve smelled bergamot on its own, or vetiver, oakmoss, tuberose or hinoki, it becomes much easier to understand what you’re responding to when those notes show up somewhere else.
The natural next question was what to do with that information. If the Gallery can tell you which materials you consistently gravitate toward, could those preferences become the basis of a fragrance made specifically for you?
Our new Fragrance-Making Workshops are our answer.
A starting point, not a blank page
Fragrance-making classes tend to fall at one of two extremes. At one end, guests choose between a few premade bases and make small adjustments to something that has largely been composed for them. At the other, they face an enormous wall of raw materials and are expected to build a balanced fragrance from scratch — liberating if you know what you’re doing, fairly intimidating if you don’t.
We wanted a middle ground: enough structure that someone with no experience can begin with a fragrance that already makes sense, and enough freedom that the finished product genuinely belongs to them.
So every workshop begins in the Gallery. You smell and score the thirty notes just like any other visitor, but for workshop guests those scores do more than generate recommendations. They become a creative brief. We compare the notes you respond to against the relationships between ingredients across a database of more than 70,000 fine fragrances, and use that to build a suggested starting formula. (If you’ve already had a Scent Portrait, you can skip straight to the studio.)
The system gets you to a plausible first draft. It doesn’t decide what your fragrance should become.
Then you start changing things
In the Fragrance Studio, you have a working palette of 65 notes. With guidance from our workshop team, you smell the suggested formula, work out what you like or dislike about it, and start making changes. You might brighten it with citrus, introduce something green or herbal, pull back a floral that feels too dominant, deepen the base with woods or resins, or take the formula somewhere completely different from where it began.
Along the way, we cover the basic ideas that make composition easier to navigate: how top, heart and base notes behave; why some ingredients disappear quickly while others last for hours; and why something unremarkable on a scent strip can become far more interesting next to another material. You don’t need to know anything about perfumery beforehand, and the workshop isn’t meant to turn an hour of your weekend into a chemistry class. The goal is to give you enough understanding to make decisions with your own nose.
That balance between technology and the physical experience shaped the room itself. superglue studio, the Bushwick design studio behind the Gallery, designed a custom twelve-seat perfumer’s bench for the space. Each seat has a mirrored screen that keeps track of your formula without filling the table with technology. Almost everything else in front of you is deliberately analog: fragrance materials, pipettes, scent strips, and whatever notes you make while trying to remember whether version four was better than version three.
A fragrance you can actually live with
At the end of the workshop, our team takes your final formula, handles the precise mixing and dilution, and bottles it as your choice of a 50 ml eau de parfum or a 100 ml room spray, labeled with the name you give it. Each session lasts 60 minutes and costs $65 per person, including the finished full-size bottle.
Keeping the workshop accessible mattered to us. Custom fragrance is usually positioned as an unusually expensive luxury, while more affordable workshops often send guests home with a small sample or travel-size vial. We wanted the experience to feel substantial without requiring a special-occasion budget: a genuine introduction to fragrance composition, with enough guidance to make something personal and enough finished fragrance to actually live with it.
The Gallery of Scent began as a way to move visitors from liking a fragrance to understanding a little more about why they like it. The Fragrance Studio completes that journey. You can now smell the individual materials, see what your preferences reveal, and use them to make something that didn’t exist when you walked in.
Book a seat
Fragrance-Making Workshops run in the Fragrance Studio, next door to the Gallery of Scent at 192 Front Street in the South Street Seaport. Sessions start every half hour, Wednesday to Friday from 3 to 6pm and Saturday and Sunday from 1 to 4:30pm. No previous experience is required.
