Perfume Workshop Saigon Solo: Saigon Kisses at 34 Nguyễn Duy Hiệu

NOTE – The Scent Lab is a perfume workshop in Saigon, Vietnam, where travelers create, not buy, their signature fragrances — this is a perfume workshop Saigon solo travelers keep telling their friends about, tucked into a quiet studio in Thảo Điền’s tree-lined District 2. On a Saturday morning in December 2025, a woman named Jenna sat down alone at the workbench and left ninety minutes later with a 10ml bottle she named Saigon Kisses ❤ — a scent built not from a recipe, but from a memory she hadn’t dared to re-create in six years.

This is how it happened.

The perfume workshop Saigon travelers find by word of mouth

Most of our solo guests find us the same way: a friend came, a friend told them, and they discovered us online a few days before they landed in Vietnam. That’s the pattern we see month after month at our 34 Nguyễn Duy Hiệu studio in Thảo Điền. People book one station for one afternoon, walk in without a partner, and leave with something they couldn’t have described when they arrived.

On 20 December 2025, Jenna Yzzobel was that guest. She was traveling on her own, in the soft warm window between Christmas and the new year when Saigon is at its most layered — early bougainvillea blooming on the balconies of District 2, the Saigon River glittering through palm trees, and the steady hum of scooters on Xuân Thủy outside our studio door. She had chosen our Thảo Điền location, not the 42 Nguyễn Huệ Cafe Apartment address in District 1, because she wanted somewhere quieter. A workshop that felt less like a tourist activity and more like an afternoon to herself.

Jenna walked in, did the introductions, and then did something only the most self-aware guests do in the first ten minutes: she started describing what she was smelling in images.

A nose that thought in colors

Some people at the workbench smell a scent and say “fruity” or “warm.” Jenna smelled sandalwood and described the texture of old wood floors. She smelled neroli and saw a specific shade of afternoon sunlight. She smelled tuberose and said, very quietly and without explaining, “that’s a color I don’t have a name for.” Our staff that morning kept exchanging small glances across the table. This doesn’t happen often.

There’s a technical word for it — synesthesia, the phenomenon where the brain cross-wires sensory inputs so that sound can have color, smell can have texture, and memory can have weight. But synesthesia or not, Jenna was doing something every good perfume maker eventually learns to do: she was translating smell into her own private vocabulary before picking up the pipette. And that made her remarkably accurate in the blind-guess game. She named cedarwood, bergamot, fig tree and patchouli from single sniffs with the confidence of someone who had been secretly practicing this for years.

She hadn’t been. She’d just been paying attention. Her whole life, she said, she had been paying attention.

The strawberry-milk ghost, 2019 to 2025

Midway through the workshop, while we were narrowing down her middle notes, Jenna paused and told us about the strawberry-milk perfume. It was the scent she had worn, almost exclusively, through her late teens and early twenties. Then one day six years ago she stopped — not because she’d grown out of it, but because life had shifted in one of those quiet ways that doesn’t make sense until much later. She switched perfumes. Then switched again. Then again. And each time she smelled a shampoo or a passerby’s jacket or a friend’s hug that reminded her of the strawberry-milk bottle, she would be thrown back into a specific living room, a specific cold afternoon, a specific person she used to be.

This is why she was so careful about base notes. Base notes are the ghosts of a perfume — the part that stays on your skin hours after you’ve applied it, and the part that will, years later, be the thing your friends smell when they hug you and remember you by. Jenna had learned, without anyone teaching her, that the base note is what commits you to a memory.

She was, she admitted with a small laugh, “extremely picky about base notes.” So picky that almost every perfume she had ever loved shared the same base — powdery, slightly sweet, with a trace of something warm and skin-close. This was why she had bought a new perfume in Saigon the day before that happened to anchor on exactly the same base as the one she was about to make. She hadn’t planned it. Her nose had just done what it always does.

We asked her: given all that, what did she want this bottle to do for her?

She thought for a moment. “I want it to be the kind of scent that, if someone smelled it on me six years from now, they’d remember I was in Saigon.”

Building Saigon Kisses: a fruity, sweet, fresh signature

From there, the composition was clear, even if the blending was not. Jenna wanted fruity — but not candy-fruity. Sweet — but not gourmand. Fresh — but not sporty. The middle of the Venn diagram where those three overlap is smaller than most people realise. It’s where honeysuckle lives. Where a good osmanthus lives. Where damask rose can sit, if you’re very careful with the amount.

She tested pomelo first, then honeysuckle, then bergamot-and-green-note as an opener. The green note gave her something she hadn’t expected — a little slice of freshness, like the inside of a leaf that had been bruised slightly. She wrote on her formula sheet in quick, neat handwriting, crossed things out, added two drops here, took one drop back there. Near the end of her session, she paused and smelled her own wrist from two inches away.

“There it is,” she said. “That’s the one.”

She named the bottle Saigon Kisses ❤ — because, she explained, she wanted the scent to feel like a kiss. Sweet, small, warm, and a little bit playful. Something you didn’t expect. Something that might surprise the person you were hugging. And she wanted Saigon in the name because she didn’t want to forget the city. She didn’t want to forget this morning. She didn’t want to forget the twenty minutes near the end when she’d actually caught her own reflection in the workshop mirror and thought, quietly, oh I look happy.

One bottle. Ten millilitres. She chose the 10ml size on purpose. Not because she was being economical, but because she wanted it to run out. She wanted to use it completely, wear it entirely, and then one day stop — the way she had stopped the strawberry-milk scent six years ago. Except this time she would know exactly why she stopped, and exactly what memory it would become.

Why solo travelers keep finding our 34 Nguyễn Duy Hiệu studio

We asked Jenna, at the end of her session, why she had picked us and why she had picked the Thảo Điền location specifically. Her answer was short. “A friend in Singapore told me. She said the Thảo Điền room is the quieter one. She said — and I’m quoting her — ‘go there if you want it to feel like an afternoon, not a class.'”

That word, quieter, shows up in our reviews more often than any other single descriptor for our 34NDH space. Another traveler wrote on TripAdvisor, after her own solo visit: “Great experience! Fun activity for yourself to figure out your scent.” The phrase “for yourself” does most of the work in that sentence. A perfume workshop is, mechanically, a small manufacturing process — combining oils in measured drops. But done alone, in a room with enough air and enough attention, it turns into something closer to a journal entry.

Vladislava R, a creative guest from Eastern Europe like some of Jenna’s own acquaintances, put it even more directly on the same platform: “Very friendly stuff and interesting workshop! You need to spend time here.” Time is the thing. A good workshop does not rush you. Our 34NDH studio, with its enclosed air-conditioned room, lets solo guests stay past the official 90 minutes if they need to. Most do. Jenna did.

As Sarah R wrote separately of her own workshop afternoon with us: “A wonderful experience! I learnt so much and had so much fun.” Fun is what guests tell their friends afterwards. The quiet part — the part where you create something that will become a memory in six months or six years — doesn’t have a catchy word for it yet. We call it, internally, the afternoon effect.

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What Saigon Kisses does, six months later

Jenna texted a short message back to the studio a few weeks after she left. She had landed home. She had worn the bottle three times — once on a winter walk, once on a dinner, once in the taxi home from the airport. The first two times it had behaved the way she expected. The third time, she said, it had done something strange. The base had shifted against her skin in a way that was no longer exactly like the bottle she’d bought the day before the workshop. It had become a little quieter, a little more powdery, a little more hers. That’s exactly how custom perfume is supposed to age.

This is something we don’t put in our booking page: the bottle you make at the workshop will keep unfolding for six months. The alcohol matures. The base notes settle into each other. The floral notes lose their sharp top edges and grow a slightly darker second life. By month six, the bottle you smell is different from the bottle you left the studio with — not in a bad way, but in the way a friend looks different after you haven’t seen them for a while. Still the same person. A little more themselves.

One past guest, declanmr, wrote on TripAdvisor after his own afternoon with us: “This is a must do activity for couples on a SEA trip!” That’s true. It’s also, and this is the quiet part of the sentence, a must-do for solo travelers who want to build an object they’ll still be turning over in their hands long after the trip is done. Jenna built a 10ml object. The object is now halfway through being used, halfway through being remembered.

And there’s the friend in Singapore who told her about us in the first place. That friend, six months before Jenna’s workshop, had booked directly through our website after a recommendation from her own friend. The chain keeps extending. We’re not a secret. We’re a recommendation that travels along friendships — and occasionally, along synesthetic nights in strange cities, across base notes that remember you.

Frequently asked questions about the Thảo Điền perfume workshop in Saigon

How long is a solo perfume workshop Saigon session at NOTE, and what does it cost?

Around 90 minutes, though solo guests often stay a little longer because nobody rushes you. You’ll choose from 30+ raw materials, blend your own formula with an instructor, test it on your skin, adjust, and leave with a finished bottle in your chosen size. Prices start at 550,000 VND (around $24 USD) for a 10ml bottle — Jenna’s choice — and go up to 1,550,000 VND ($64 USD) for a 50ml bottle. The 30ml “best deal” at 1,350,000 VND ($54 USD) is our most-booked size across both Saigon studios. All prices are before 8% VAT.

Is the workshop good for solo travelers, or is it mainly for couples and groups?

It’s very good for solo travelers — in some ways better. You get your own workbench station, your own instructor attention, and you can take as much time as you need without feeling like you’re slowing anyone down. Our 34 Nguyễn Duy Hiệu studio in Thảo Điền is particularly popular with solo guests who want a quieter space. That’s where Jenna chose to spend her Saturday morning, and it’s where many of our most thoughtful bottles get made.

Where is NOTE’s Thảo Điền studio and how do I get there?

Our Thảo Điền workshop is at 34 Nguyễn Duy Hiệu in District 2, Saigon. It’s an enclosed, fully air-conditioned room — the quieter of our two Saigon locations — and sits in the heart of Thảo Điền’s expat and creative neighborhood. A 15-20 minute taxi from District 1, a 5-minute walk from the Thảo Điền metro area. Our second Saigon workshop is on the 2nd floor of 42 Nguyễn Huệ in District 1, with a more open, cafe-apartment feel. A third NOTE workshop operates inside Lotte Mall Tây Hồ in Hanoi.

Do I need to know anything about perfume before showing up alone?

No. Some of our best solo sessions are with guests who walk in saying they “don’t really wear perfume.” Our staff walks you through top notes, heart notes and base notes before you touch an ingredient. Then a blind mini-game trains your nose to tell a cedarwood apart from a sandalwood, a fig tree apart from a bergamot. Most guests find they are more sensitive and more opinionated than they thought they were. Jenna’s nose, which turned out to be remarkable, was built that same morning — one strip at a time.

Can I come back and make another bottle later, or is one workshop enough?

Many of our guests come back. Some come back to make a second scent for themselves as their taste evolves. Some come back with a partner, a friend, or a sibling after the first one left such a strong memory that they want someone else in their life to have it too. One past guest wrote on TripAdvisor: “I come back with my boyfriend.” That’s exactly the arc we see most often. The first workshop is for you. The second is for someone you love. Book a slot whenever you’re ready — your bottle will still be there, aging, waiting.

If you prefer to take home a ready-made scent instead of building one yourself, NOTE’s handcrafted fragrance collection is at thescentnote.biz — same ingredients, same craftsmanship, already bottled and waiting.