03 Jul Tell Your Story
On a quiet street in a small French town, we found one of our favorite experiences of our summer vacation: a perfume-making workshop. It was a chance to learn how fragrances are crafted and to leave with a bottle of our own perfume creation.
Each of us sat at a workstation with tiered rows of amber glass bottles arranged neatly in front of us. The bottles were labeled with names like musc floral, lavande des Alpes, and bouton de rose. The woman leading the session was what’s known in the fragrance world as a “nose”—a professional who has trained for years to refine their sense of smell, memorize thousands of aroma molecules, and blend scents with harmony and precision.
The instructor explained the structure of a perfume, saying that every scent begins with a foundation of base notes that anchor the fragrance and give it depth, layered with heart notes that form the main character and identity of the fragrance, and finished with the fleeting top notes, designed to create a first impression but evaporate within a few minutes. “Smell quickly,” she said. “Don’t overthink. Choose what speaks to you. Your nose will know.”
As we began to smell from each bottle in front of us, the instructor moved around the room, pausing to help people decide how much of each note to add—less of the strong, earthy tones that could overpower a fragrance, more of the light florals that bloom quickly and fade.
When she came by my workstation, I asked what made her decide to pursue a career in perfume. She told me she’d always loved the way smells could bring people and places back to her, like the scent of her grandmother’s raisin bread baking in the oven, the fig tree in summer, her mother’s rose-scented powder as she leaned in to say goodnight. She explained that as she learned new scents, she enjoyed linking them to memories, layering feeling and familiarity into every blend.
That experience, she said with a smile, was what she hoped we would take from the workshop—not just to make perfume, but to tell your story through scent.
I carried her words with me as I closed my eyes and let the memories surface, lifting each amber bottle to my nose to decide on my heart notes. Gardenia reminded me of the air near my parents’ front door, where a gardenia plant grew along the wall and released its scent each time we walked by. A warm vanilla scent brought back afternoons in the kitchen with the girls, scooping dough onto baking sheets and licking batter from spoons. One of the lavender scents brought me back to the summer lavender festival in Albuquerque, where we’d walk through sun-soaked fields cutting bunches to take home. Another scent transported me to my grandmother’s gourmet cooking shop in Indiana, with its deep, comforting mix of cheese, fresh bread, and the earthy warmth of coffee and tea. And the subtle smell of lilies reminded me of the morning of my wedding, bouquets waiting in nearby buckets as I got ready to walk down the aisle.
Near the end of the session, the instructor came back with a small slip of paper and asked what I’d like the label on my perfume creation to read.
I paused to think. “How would you say ‘Tell Your Story’ in French?” I asked.
She wrote it out in careful script: Raconte Votre Histoire.
That’s what my label says now, printed on the small glass bottle I carried home. It’s more than a souvenir. It’s a small, fragrant piece of memory.
If you were telling your story through scent, what would you choose as the heart notes?