I went to a perfume-making workshop out of pure curiosity. I wanted to learn something new, understand what actually happens inside the bottles I review, and, of course, make my own perfume. On Saturday 26 September I got all three. Just not quite in the way I imagined.

Smell, the forgotten sense

The workshop was run by Laboratorium D–I–Y and led by Illia Meier and Michał Dziadkowiec. Illia is an artist who has been working with scent since 2023, with three fragrances of his own and a scented jewellery project called EROS/THANATOS. Michał is a designer, educator and the founder of Krakowska 34, the Kraków project where Laboratorium D–I–Y began.

I expected them to know a lot, and they did. What I didn't expect was how they talk about perfume. For them, a composition is a story, a portal to a place or a moment, something with history and depth. Every oil on the table came with a little context: where it comes from, how it behaves, what kind of feeling it can carry. 

One thing they said right at the start stayed with me all day. Smell is a forgotten sense. We consume almost everything through our eyes now: screens, TV, the internet. Our noses barely get a turn. That workshop was four hours of giving mine one.

A small room that got cosy fast

There were 16 of us, which turned out to be the perfect size. Everyone had a chance to ask questions and get help from Illia or Michał whenever they got stuck. At the beginning we were all a little shy and quiet. By the end it felt like a room full of people who had known each other for years.

Meeting the raw materials

We smelled around 40 oils. Some of them I had never smelled on their own before, and that's when I realised something slightly embarrassing: my nose is trained on designer fragrances. The kind you find at Sephora. I recently heard someone use the phrase "adult pro max" to describe a person who is really mature, the most grown-up version of themselves. Well, my nose is definitely not a "nose pro max". Not yet, anyway. Smelling raw materials one by one was a completely different experience.

My favourites:

Nobody smells the same thing

The most fascinating part wasn't any single oil. It was hearing how differently everyone described them. One person would call something obviously white florals, and the person next to them would swear it was citrus. We all have slightly different noses, so we all build slightly different comparisons.

It made me think about reviews in a new way. When someone writes that a perfume smells like "clean laundry" and you smell "cold metal", neither of you is wrong.

Four vials and a reality check

Each of us got four vials to test the compositions we'd planned, and more if we needed them. I had several attempts. And not one of my final versions smelled the way I had imagined it in my head.

That's when it hit me: this is not easy. At all.

Later, someone asked Illia how long it took him to create one of his fragrances. His answer: one project took him two years. I loved that. Not because it made me feel better about my afternoon (it did, a little), but because it showed what perfume can be when it's treated as an art form. Slow, deliberate, and built to tell a story.

What I made

I wanted to create an autumn fragrance. I went with vanilla, galaxolide, patchouli and methyl cinnamate.

Right now, fresh, it smells like the cough syrup I used to get as a kid. I'm being honest. But after about 30 minutes it turns into something I actually like, a soft, enveloping cinnamon that wraps around you like a scarf.

And here's the exciting part: perfume changes as the oils blend together over the following weeks. In a month it could smell completely different. So I'm leaving it alone and waiting to see who it becomes.

Why I'd go again

This is exactly why I signed up. I wanted to look at perfume differently, describe it better and learn to pull a composition apart into top, heart and base. I left with all of that, plus a lot more respect for the people who do this for years.

If there's a workshop like this in your city, go. The only people I wouldn't recommend it to are those who are very sensitive to intense smells, because 40 concentrated oils in one room is a lot. But for anyone reading Fragletter? I think you'd love every minute.