Announcements
The Gallery of Scent Is Staying Through December
When we opened the Gallery of Scent at the South Street Seaport in May, it was meant to be temporary. We’d been selected for the Downtown Alliance’s RE:Store program and given the chance to open our first-ever dedicated retail space. Rather than build a conventional store, we used it to try something we’d been thinking about for years: what would it look like to put fragrance on display the way a museum puts art on display?
The result is built around thirty individual perfumery ingredients, presented one at a time through touch-activated misters. Visitors pick up a scorecard, smell their way through five flights — Fresh, Floral & Fruit, Spice & Green, Wood & Earth, and The Dark Arts — and score each note from one to four. Once the card is scanned, those scores become a personalized Scent Portrait and a set of fragrance recommendations. Alongside the Gallery, we opened our first soap refillery and started running hands-on candle-making workshops with the same team that pours our candles in Bushwick.
We expected to do this for the summer and then pack it up. Instead, the Gallery has become a much bigger part of Element Brooklyn than we anticipated, so we’ve extended our stay at 192 Front Street through December 30.
What 196,000 scores taught us
One reason we built the Gallery is that fragrance is surprisingly hard to talk about. Most of us know instantly whether we like a scent, but unless you spend a lot of time around perfume, it’s much harder to say why. The ingredient list on a candle might tell you it contains vetiver, neroli or oakmoss — not especially useful if you’ve never smelled any of them on their own.
Separating the ingredients changes that. Since May, more than 7,000 visitors have completed a scorecard, leaving us with over 196,000 individual scores. Some results are what you’d expect: jasmine is the most-loved note in the room, and half of all visitors give it a perfect four. Others are more surprising. Vetiver, the backbone of countless classic fragrances, is the least liked on its own — nearly two in three visitors give it the lowest score. Neroli, one of perfumery’s most beautiful names, gets the lowest score from almost a third of the people who smell it.
None of that makes those materials bad. It means a note on its own and a note inside a finished fragrance are very different experiences, and most people have never had the chance to compare the two. Watching visitors compare scorecards, argue about individual notes and discover unexpected favorites has been one of the most satisfying parts of the experiment.
We’ve also learned that people are willing to spend far more time with scent than a conventional store allows. The Gallery doesn’t encourage you to race toward a shelf. It asks you to slow down, smell thirty things, think about them, and leave knowing a little more about your own taste than when you arrived. That has worked well enough that we’re not just extending the space — we’re expanding what you can do there.
From smelling fragrance to making it
This month we opened a dedicated Fragrance Studio next door to the Gallery. Our new Fragrance-Making Workshops take the preferences you discover in the Gallery and turn them into the starting point for a scent of your own.
Workshop guests receive a suggested formula based on the notes they scored highest and on how those ingredients relate to one another across tens of thousands of fine fragrances. From there, the formula is open to change. With a palette of 65 notes and our workshop team alongside, guests add, remove and rebalance until the fragrance feels like theirs. It goes home as a 50 ml eau de parfum or a 100 ml room spray.
Our candle-making workshops are continuing too, and the Refillery remains open with ten soap fragrances on tap. Bring an empty bottle from home, choose a fragrance and refill it by weight, or pick up a reusable vessel at the Gallery and bring it back the next time you visit.
Through the holidays
The Gallery was always an experiment in what a physical Element Brooklyn space could be: somewhere that makes fragrance easier to explore, makes refilling visible and intuitive, and gives people a reason to spend time with the products rather than walk past them on a shelf. This summer convinced us there’s a lot more to explore.
The Gallery of Scent is now open at 192 Front Street through December 30, 2026. Admission is free and walk-ins are welcome. Fragrance and candle workshops are ticketed and often sell out, so book ahead.
- Wednesday to Friday: 12–7pm
- Saturday and Sunday: 11am–6pm
- Monday and Tuesday: closed
We’d love to see you before the end of the year.
