From Philippines to Saigon: A Best Friend Reunion Workshop at 34NDH

NOTE – The Scent Lab is a perfume workshop in Saigon, Vietnam, where two childhood best friends from the Philippines met again after years apart — a best friend reunion Saigon workshop morning that ended with a candle-swap ritual at our 34 Nguyễn Duy Hiệu studio in Thảo Điền. On 10 January 2026, Javier flew in from Ireland without knowing her flight was a surprise booked by her oldest friend, JM. Ninety minutes later, each of them was holding a candle the other had just poured — and a small bottle of something green, cool and wooded, built around a Filipino grandmother’s perfume lineage.

Names in this story have been changed to protect our guests privacy. Details of the workshop experience — the perfumes made, the studio, the conversations — are authentic.

This is how the morning unfolded.

A best friend reunion Saigon workshop — and a passport borrowed without asking

The story started months before Javier ever walked through our studio door. JM, her oldest friend from their Philippines childhood, had quietly messaged Javier’s sister for a photo of her passport and a copy of her ID. Not to do anything suspicious. To book two plane tickets to Vietnam.

Javier is an accountant in Ireland now. She hadn’t been back to Manila in a long time. She hadn’t seen JM, properly and in person and without a video call between them, in even longer. Last year she had flown in for JM’s wedding, and that was the last time the two had shared the same room, the same weather, the same cup of coffee. Then Ireland had pulled her back into its grey winters and its quarterly filings and its early flat-white mornings.

So when JM revealed the tickets — Manila to Ho Chi Minh City, two seats, side by side, a week of nothing but each other — Javier did the thing people do when they are very surprised and very happy at the same time. She laughed, and then she cried, and then she started packing before she had fully processed that it was happening.

Kitty Princess vs. the rival gang: a childhood in two colors

They had not always been best friends. Growing up in the Philippines, Javier and JM had belonged to two different kid-gangs — Javier was a proud member of the Kitty Princess group, and JM ran with the rival side. The two groups fought the way small-town children fight: loudly, briefly, with dramatic reconciliations on Monday mornings.

Then the gangs outgrew themselves. The girls became teenagers. The teenagers became young women. And somewhere in that long slow quiet of growing up, Javier and JM became the kind of friends who know each other’s family secrets and each other’s passport numbers. The kind of friends who plan surprise international trips without asking.

At the workbench in our Thảo Điền studio, Javier told us this while JM pretended to be annoyed and then laughed at exactly the right moments. They finished each other’s sentences. They remembered exactly which side of the school corridor each gang had claimed. Twenty years later, they were on the same side of the workbench, sharing the same tray of blotter strips.

It’s the kind of morning that makes our staff go quiet for a second. A review left on TripAdvisor by another past guest captured the feeling without trying to: “Such a beautiful experience. My daughter and I did a spontaneous perfume making workshop here today.” Spontaneous. That was the right word. Almost every best-friend pair and almost every family who walks through our 34NDH door carries a version of that same spontaneity — a “we just decided” energy that only happens when the relationship between the two people is old and steady enough to afford it.

“Such a beautiful experience. My daughter and I did a spontaneous perfume making workshop here today.”
— Sarah S, TripAdvisor review

Why Thảo Điền, and why a scent workshop, for the reunion day

We asked them why they had chosen the Thảo Điền studio — 34 Nguyễn Duy Hiệu, a quiet tree-lined street in District 2 — instead of our 42 Nguyễn Huệ address inside the Cafe Apartment in District 1. JM answered first. They wanted somewhere still. Somewhere that didn’t feel like a tourist tick-box. A room where two friends who hadn’t had a real afternoon together in a year could sit down, do something slow with their hands, and actually talk.

Thảo Điền does that. The neighborhood wraps around you in a way District 1 doesn’t. Palm trees lean into the roads. The air is a little cooler under the canopy. The scooters are less insistent. Our enclosed, air-conditioned studio on Nguyễn Duy Hiệu is one of two Saigon workshop rooms we run — the quieter one, the one solo travelers and close friends keep choosing. That morning, the two of them had it almost to themselves.

They had also done some shopping on the way. A lot of shopping, in fact. JM confessed, between laughs, that each of them had already “accidentally” bought ten bags of clothes, four kilograms of dried mango, and two kilograms of coffee before arriving at the workshop. They were running out of suitcase space. They were not running out of best-friend energy.

The plan for the day was a candle workshop today, a coffee workshop tomorrow. They wanted to meet locals. They wanted to do things with their hands rather than point at things through bus windows. Javier, between sniffs of cedarwood and bergamot, said what a lot of our guests say but rarely articulate: we wanted to make something, not just see something.

The candle-swap ritual: one each, for the other

The heart of their best friend reunion Saigon workshop morning was not the scent. It was the ritual. Each of them would pour one candle for the other, and then they would trade. That way, every time Javier lit hers back in Ireland on a cold grey Tuesday night, she would be smelling a candle JM had built. And every time JM lit hers in Manila on a Sunday afternoon, she would be smelling Javier.

Candles, in our studio, are built the same way perfumes are — top, heart, and base. We walked them through the olfactive families, the note structure, the way soy wax holds a warm note differently from how alcohol carries a fresh one. They sniffed. They argued. They giggled. JM built something that smelled warm, nearly edible, anchored in vanilla and something resinous. Javier built something cooler, greener, more awake.

Then they swapped. JM held Javier’s candle up to her nose and said, “Oh. This is you. This is what your apartment smells like when I imagine it.” Javier lit JM’s wick in her head, mentally, and decided she’d be opening it on the first rainy evening after she landed back in Dublin.

This is exactly the kind of small ceremony we keep seeing at our 34NDH studio. Another past guest, here with her mother, wrote about the same feeling in her own way: “The instructor was very kind and easy to understand. I participated with my mother — a very meaningful time with people who participated together.”

“The instructor was very kind and easy to understand. I participated with my mother — a very meaningful time with people who participated together.”
— Family guest, via our booking platform

The phrase “people who participated together” is clumsy English, but it’s the right shape. A candle-swap between two old friends is not two separate souvenirs. It is one ritual split in half and carried across two oceans.

The grandmother who was a perfumer: a Filipino lineage in a Saigon bottle

While the candles were setting, Javier told us something she hadn’t planned to tell us. Her grandmother, back in the Philippines, had been a perfumer. Not a trained one, not a commercial one, but a village-famous one — a woman whose single signature scent was well known enough in her town that people would recognize it from a doorway. The scent was unapologetically fruity, built around a melon note that sat proud on top, warm and sun-ripe. Her grandmother had never called it a “perfume line.” She had just made it, worn it, and become it.

Javier has her grandmother’s nose, she thinks. But she does not have her grandmother’s life. She works in Irish finance, spends long days in spreadsheets and audit trails, and needs to walk into meetings in a scent that communicates poise rather than ripe cantaloupe. Fruity doesn’t suit her Tuesday mornings. So recently, she has been gravitating toward cooler, greener, more wooded fragrances — scents with composure, scents that don’t shout.

JM, who had been listening to this the way only an oldest friend can listen — without interrupting, without fixing, just taking notes with her eyes — decided quietly that she would build the perfume Javier did not quite have the confidence to build for herself. Something green. Something fresh. Something wooded and a little bit cool. Something professional enough to wear into a client meeting in Dublin, and personal enough to still smell like the granddaughter of a village perfumer from the Philippines.

Another past guest at our Thảo Điền workshop put the feeling of this kind of long-lens, memory-keyed session into one line on TripAdvisor: “My daughter took a similar class in Singapore but this is at a different level. We learnt about sensory moods and smells. We will definitely come back!” Javier nodded when we showed her the quote later. Sensory moods — that was, she said, exactly what she had been trying to find words for.

“My daughter took a similar class in Singapore but this is at a different level. We learnt about sensory moods and smells. We will definitely come back!”
— Michael, family visitor via our booking platform

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Sweet Candy <3: the formula JM built for Javier

JM named the perfume Sweet Candy <3, which is — if you know JM — entirely in character. She had been calling Javier “Sweet Candy” since they were teenagers. Nobody else calls her that. The heart on the end of the name wasn’t a decoration. It was a signature.

The composition itself was, deliberately, the opposite of what their grandmother’s generation would have worn. JM built the opening around a green-and-citrus lift — bergamot brightened with a torn-leaf green note, something that smells like standing barefoot on damp grass in the early morning. The heart drifted cooler: a tight floral supported by a small touch of fig and a breath of pomelo, so that the fruit lineage was still there, quietly, without ever announcing itself. The base pulled into wood. A little cedarwood for spine, a little soft sandalwood for warmth, and just enough of a clean musk to let it wear all day without tiring.

It was, in one word, composed. Javier tested it on her wrist, walked slowly around the studio, let it sit for ten minutes, and came back smiling. “I can wear this to work,” she said. Then, after a beat: “I can also wear this on a Saturday.” A good signature scent does both.

We wrote the formula down onto her formula card in careful handwriting, because the formula is hers now. She can reorder the same blend, or a variation of it, any time — and the bottle she left with will keep evolving on its own for the next six months. This is something we tell guests at the end of every session: the scent you leave the studio with is not the final scent. Alcohol matures. Base notes settle. Floral tops lose their sharp edges and grow a second, darker life. By the time Javier opens the bottle on a weeknight in Dublin, six months from now, Sweet Candy <3 will smell a little more like her than it does today.

If you are looking for a more structured introduction to the 90-minute format, our guide to what happens inside a perfume workshop walks through the full sequence — top, heart, base — with images from the bench.

Saigon as a meeting point for Southeast Asian friends

One of the quiet patterns we notice at 34NDH is how often Saigon gets chosen as a reunion city. Not as a destination in itself, but as a neutral, easy, warm middle ground where friends from different parts of Southeast Asia and its diaspora can meet. A Filipino accountant living in Dublin. A Filipino friend still in Manila. The flights are reasonable from both sides. The visa is simple. The food is good. The shopping, as Javier and JM kept proving, is dangerous.

And Saigon holds reunions well. Thảo Điền in particular has quietly become a neighborhood where travelers stay for a week rather than a day — enough bánh mì to matter, enough coffee shops for long conversations, a river that catches the late afternoon light. Our studio is built into the fabric of that slower rhythm. Solo travelers come, but so do pairs: sisters, best friends, a mother and daughter, a newlywed couple on their second Vietnam trip. For a fuller picture of how a solo afternoon at 34NDH feels, we’ve written a companion piece about our solo-traveler Saigon Kisses session — a different bottle, same workbench.

A guest named Trang, who came with her own group and later wrote about us on TripAdvisor, summarised our 34NDH studio in one line: “Good experienced. Staffs are super friendly and nice. I love this place so much.” The grammar is imperfect. The emotion is not.

“Good experienced. Staffs are super friendly and nice. I love this place so much.”
— Trang M, TripAdvisor review

What to do on a reunion afternoon in Thảo Điền, around the workshop

If you are building a best friend reunion Saigon workshop day of your own, 34 Nguyễn Duy Hiệu is easy to wrap a full afternoon around. The neighborhood, District 2’s Thảo Điền, is small enough to walk and quiet enough to linger in. Most of our reunion-pair guests arrive twenty minutes early, find a coffee at one of the cafes on Xuân Thủy or Nguyễn Văn Hưởng, and use that buffer to start their catching-up before the workshop even begins.

After the ninety minutes — and after the inevitable twenty extra minutes of photographs at the end of the bench — most pairs walk ten minutes to the Saigon River waterfront for a sunset beer, or back up Xuân Thủy for a long lunch. Some of our reunion guests have tagged on a group cooking class the next day. Javier and JM had booked a coffee workshop for day two, which is exactly the Thảo Điền rhythm: one slow craft today, one slow craft tomorrow, a lot of walking and talking in between.

For travelers building a wider Saigon itinerary around the reunion, our guide to unique things to do in HCMC is a good next tab to open. It covers the small, hand-made, memory-heavy side of Saigon that reunion friends tend to prefer — workshops, hidden museums, quiet cafes — rather than the loud tick-the-box version.

One candle each, across two oceans

At the end of the morning, they stood at the counter with two candles, one perfume bottle, two formula cards, and a phone full of photographs. The candles were still cooling. They packed them carefully — JM for the flight back to Manila, Javier for the longer haul to Dublin. They wrote each other’s names on the bottoms of the jars in permanent marker, so there would be no confusion about whose memory belonged where.

Then they left, back into the Thảo Điền afternoon, arguing about where to eat and whether there was still suitcase room for one more kilogram of dried mango.

A TripAdvisor guest named Julie, here with her own kids, wrote about a morning very much like theirs: “Tien truly made the experience exceptional. She was not only knowledgeable, but also so warm, patient, and engaging. I attended with my two kids and she made sure they felt included.” Included is the right word for any good reunion morning at the workbench. Nobody feels like a visitor.

“Tien truly made the experience exceptional. She was not only knowledgeable, but also so warm, patient, and engaging. I attended with my two kids and she made sure they felt included.”
— Julie D, TripAdvisor review

Javier messaged us three weeks later from Ireland. She had lit JM’s candle on a Wednesday evening, curled up in the corner of her couch, with a mug of tea in one hand and the bottle of Sweet Candy <3 on the table beside her. The candle was burning slowly, evenly, warmly. It smelled, she wrote, exactly like the afternoon in Thảo Điền. Exactly like her oldest friend sitting next to her at a workbench, twenty years after the Kitty Princess gang and the rival gang had declared their final truce.

Frequently asked questions about the best friend reunion Saigon workshop at 34NDH

Is NOTE’s Thảo Điền studio a good place for a best friend reunion day in Saigon?

Yes — the 34 Nguyễn Duy Hiệu studio is our quieter Saigon location, with an enclosed air-conditioned room and space for small-group reunions. Many of our best reunion stories happen between two old friends sharing a single workbench. The 90-minute format lets you catch up while you create, rather than trying to talk over a loud restaurant or a tourist queue.

Can two friends do a candle-swap ritual at the workshop — each pours one for the other?

Absolutely, and this is one of our favourite reunion formats. You each build a candle as a gift for the other, then swap at the end, so that every time you light it back home you are smelling a scent your friend designed with you in mind. Javier and JM did exactly this on 10 January 2026, and it remains one of the most meaningful sessions our Thảo Điền staff have run this year.

Can we do a candle workshop and a perfume workshop in the same session?

We can tailor the session to include both formats — for example, one person builds a candle while the other builds a perfume, or each of you creates one candle for the other and a personal perfume for yourselves. Let us know in the booking notes which combination you’d like, and we’ll set the bench accordingly.

How much does a reunion session cost, and what sizes are available?

The standard workshop runs around 90 minutes. Perfume bottles start at 550,000 VND (around $24 USD) for 10ml and go up to 1,550,000 VND ($64 USD) for 50ml, with the 30ml Best Deal at 1,350,000 VND ($54 USD) as our most-booked size. Candle sizes are similarly tiered. All prices are before 8% VAT. Couples and best-friend pairs commonly book two stations side by side.

How do we get to 34 Nguyễn Duy Hiệu, and which Saigon studio should we choose?

34 Nguyễn Duy Hiệu is in Thảo Điền, District 2 — a 15-20 minute taxi ride from District 1, in a quieter, leafier neighborhood. Choose it for reunions, solo visits, and long slow afternoons. Our second Saigon workshop is on the 2nd floor of 42 Nguyễn Huệ in District 1, inside the Cafe Apartment building, with a more open and bustling vibe. Both stock the same 30+ professional-grade ingredients.

All guest names in this story are pseudonyms used with permission under our privacy policy. Workshop details and testimonials are authentic and verified.

If you’d rather take home a ready-made scent instead of building one from scratch with a friend, NOTE’s handcrafted fragrance collection is at thescentnote.biz — same ingredients, same craftsmanship, already bottled and waiting.