Old Man Super Potion: A Veteran's Saigon Return at 42 Nguyễn Huệ

NOTE – The Scent Lab is a perfume workshop in Saigon, Vietnam, on the 2nd floor of the 1960s cafe apartment at 42 Nguyễn Huệ, and one quiet afternoon in March 2025 an older American traveller climbed the creaking staircase with his wife and sat down at the workbench to make a perfume he would later name, with a small private smile, Old Man Super Potion. This is a perfume workshop Saigon returnees come to when they want an afternoon that makes sense of a long life — a veteran return Vietnam perfume workshop story we have been thinking about ever since.

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.

It was not a dramatic afternoon. It was a careful one.

A veteran return Vietnam perfume workshop, from the inside

The second floor of 42 Nguyễn Huệ smells like a building before it smells like a workshop. Old plaster. Coffee drifting up the stairwell from the cafe two doors down. The slow, cool draught of an air-conditioner that has been running since morning. If you have never climbed these stairs before, the first thing that surprises you is that this is a real residential block. People still live behind some of these peeling pastel doors. The lift still creaks. The window frames still wear the paint of sixty-odd years of afternoon sun.

On 15 March 2025, a retired American traveller we’ll call Bác Pat — bác is the Vietnamese word for “uncle”, used with warmth for older men — walked up those stairs with his wife. He was not a first-time visitor to Vietnam. He had been here once before, half a lifetime ago, as a very young man. He had come back, in his seventies, for a quieter kind of reason. They were here this time with friends, slow-travelling, volunteering, visiting children’s projects supported by a small American charity called the DOVE Fund, which he and his wife had helped raise money for over many years.

Our instructor at 42NH had been told, by the friend who booked the session on their behalf, only this: a gentle couple, both retired, wanted to make a perfume together in Saigon that “smelled like Vietnam, on his skin”. No pressure. No time limit. Just an afternoon.

This is the kind of booking we protect quietly. The studio is never fully empty on a weekday afternoon, but we try, on days like this one, to give the room a little more space than usual.

The perfume workshop Saigon return began with listening, not choosing

Bác Pat sat down first. His wife sat beside him. The workbench at 42NH holds about thirty small glass vials at any one time — raw materials chosen for the climate, for the skin, for what we have available from trusted Vietnamese and imported suppliers that season. Cinnamon from Yên Bái. Star anise. Pomelo leaf. Frankincense. Vetiver, which in Vietnamese is called hương bài, a grass the older generation still associates with clean laundry and ancestor altars.

He did not reach for anything immediately. He picked each vial up the way you pick up a photograph you have not seen in decades — slowly, two hands, close to the face. His hearing, he told our instructor with a small apology, was not what it used to be. Neither was his sight. So he would need a little longer to read the labels. That was fine. Everybody at this workbench needs a little longer than they think they will.

The first note he stayed with was vetiver. He held the strip, breathed, held it again. He did not say anything for a while. Then, in English, softly: “That one. That’s a Vietnam smell.” His wife looked over and nodded.

One of the things we keep learning from this job is that the older a guest is, the less they tend to narrate. They take their time. They don’t explain. They smell something, and either they keep the strip or they put it back. It is a calmer kind of session than the one a twenty-three-year-old backpacker usually has, and in some ways it is our favourite kind — because the craft gets to do the talking.

A couple, a charity, and a long love letter to Vietnam

Over the ninety minutes, small pieces of the story arrived sideways, the way the late afternoon light arrived — glancing, never head-on.

Bác Pat and his wife had been DOVE Fund supporters for many years. DOVE — “Development of Vietnam Endeavors” — is a small all-volunteer charity run by American veterans and their families, building classrooms and funding scholarships for children in central Vietnam. It is not a famous organisation. It is not political. It is a handful of people, mostly retired, who keep showing up. He mentioned it once, briefly, without pride, the way some people mention a long marriage: as a fact, not a claim.

They had come back to Vietnam several times together. They loved the country — not loudly, not as a performance, but the way you love a place you have had a long and complicated relationship with and have decided, quietly, to keep choosing. This trip, a mutual friend had gifted them an afternoon at the workshop. Bác Pat had said yes because his wife wanted to try it. By the halfway mark, it was clear he was the one who had fallen in.

“I want something that smells like this country,” he said at one point, gesturing vaguely toward the open door, the walking street below, the hum of scooters rising five floors. “But — wearable. Something an old man can wear.”

That, as much as anything, is the brief our instructor worked to.

Building a perfume that “smells Vietnamese but lives on his skin”

The formula came together the way a good quiet meal comes together: with trust.

Our instructor suggested a structure — a top note of pomelo leaf and a whisper of bergamot for the first ten minutes on the skin; a heart of cinnamon and a single drop of osmanthus to bring warmth without sweetness; a base anchored by vetiver, sandalwood, and a careful amount of agarwood, the resinous Vietnamese wood older travellers often recognise from temples and home altars. Bác Pat tested each layer on a paper strip first. Then on the inside of his wrist. Then, ten minutes later, on his wrist again. He was patient with the waiting.

He adjusted only in small amounts. A little less cinnamon — “I don’t want to smell like a kitchen.” A little more vetiver — “That’s the one.” One drop of frankincense at the very end, because he liked the way it rounded the edges. “Bác tin tưởng hoàn toàn vào gợi ý của instructor và chỉ điều chỉnh thêm bớt tỉ lệ cho tới khi hợp ý của mình nhất” — that line is from the note our instructor kept in the session log, and it is the truest one-sentence summary of how he worked: he trusted the guide, and he adjusted only enough to make it his.

When the formula was finished, our instructor asked the question we always ask at the end: “What will you call it?”

He thought for a moment. He looked down at his wrist. He looked at his wife. And then, with a grin that was half apology, half old-man self-irony, he said: “Old Man Super Potion.”

His wife laughed. Our instructor laughed. The bottle label was written by hand in his own careful script, all capitals, and it went into the little paper bag alongside the formula card.

As Celine, a TripAdvisor reviewer who came to the same workbench on a different afternoon, wrote about us: “Making perfume in a space with fresh flowers on a rainy afternoon is romantic.” The 15th of March was not rainy. The light was high and white. The romance in the room was a different register: a long-married couple, a bottle, a joke about being old. But the feeling was in the same family.

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Why 42 Nguyễn Huệ is the right room for a return journey

You could run a veteran return Vietnam perfume workshop in any number of rooms. A hotel suite. A private studio. A quiet corner of a resort spa. We also run workshops at our Thảo Điền studio in District 2 and inside Lotte Mall Tây Hồ in Hanoi, and each of those rooms has its own gravity. But 42 Nguyễn Huệ does something particular to an afternoon like this one.

Part of it is the building. The cafe apartment, as locals call it, is one of the few places left in central Saigon where you can walk through a mid-century Vietnamese residential layout that has not been scrubbed into a renovation. The staircase echoes the way it echoed in 1965 and 1985 and 2005. The lift sometimes gets stuck. The neighbours upstairs are actual neighbours. For an older traveller who knew an earlier version of this city, the building reads as continuity rather than nostalgia — this place kept going. So did we. Nothing needs to be said about that out loud.

Part of it is the 2nd-floor window. It opens onto Nguyễn Huệ walking street, and on a weekday afternoon the noise from below arrives softened and ordinary: a scooter horn, a schoolchild laughing, a coffee cart. The light comes in sideways across the bench and turns the tester strips faintly gold.

And part of it is that the studio is a craft space, not a memorial. What happens at the bench is blending. What happens in the rest of a life is the rest of a life. The two things meet, gently, in the bottle at the end — but the bottle is the work, not the sermon. As Tina C wrote on TripAdvisor after her own session: “Beautiful space, amazing hospitality and great information from knowledgeable host.” Hospitality, for us, partly means knowing which afternoons to keep light.

What an afternoon like this teaches the studio

We learn more from older guests than from almost anyone else. Not because they know more about perfume — most of them don’t, and don’t pretend to — but because they know more about time. They know how a smell lives on a collar for a week. They know which scents remind them of a mother, a barracks, a classroom, a first house. They know when to stop adjusting. They do not confuse new with better.

Bác Pat taught us three small things that afternoon that we have since passed on to other instructors.

The first: if a guest takes a long time to pick up a vial, do not fill the silence. Let them read the label at their own pace. The silence is part of the craft.

The second: when a couple comes together, ask both of them how they want the perfume to smell from a hug. That is often the real brief. Bác Pat’s wife was, in effect, the second perfumer at the bench — she’d be the one smelling this scent from the next chair on a flight, at a breakfast table, in the hallway of a guesthouse for the rest of the trip.

The third: a self-deprecating name is not a small thing. It is a way of claiming the object without taking it too seriously. Old Man Super Potion is not a modest name. It is a confident one, disguised as modesty. He knew exactly what he had made.

As Inspire03548283877 wrote on TripAdvisor after her first visit: “It was my first time. I truly enjoyed the cozy atmosphere and hands-on experience.” First time, thirtieth time, or once-in-a-decade return — the room is built to hold any of those, and most days it holds more than one at once.

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What happens to a perfume like this after it leaves the studio

Bác Pat and his wife walked out onto Nguyễn Huệ that afternoon with a small paper bag in his hand and no particular plan for the rest of the day. They were going to visit a project the DOVE Fund had helped build, later that week, in a province several hours north. The bottle was going with them. The bottle would fly home with them afterwards, across an ocean, into a drawer in a house somewhere quiet in the United States.

This is the part of the workshop we do not put on the booking page. The scent you make at our workbench will keep unfolding for six months. You will wear it on a flight. You will wear it on a morning when the weather is completely wrong for the memory. A trace of it will turn up, months later, on a shirt collar or a scarf you forgot to wash, and suddenly you will be standing on the 2nd floor of 42 Nguyễn Huệ again, with the window open and the light coming in sideways, and the vetiver on your wrist. Another TripAdvisor guest, Relax53765253820, wrote: “The workshop was amazing, the space and environment is very clean, comfortable and beautiful.” Clean, comfortable, beautiful — those are the surface words. The part that comes later, on a collar, in a drawer, at a kitchen table, is what makes people email us photographs years afterwards.

Bác Pat has not emailed us a photograph, yet. He may never. Some people keep their bottles private. That is fine. We know what was made in that room on 15 March 2025. The bottle knows. His wife knows. That is enough of a ledger.

Why “Old Man Super Potion” is, quietly, the best perfume name we heard that year

Most travellers name their bottles after the trip. Saigon ’25. Hanoi Honeymoon. There is nothing wrong with those names.

But the best perfume names, the ones we remember years later, name the wearer, not the place. They say, this is me, today, at this age, in this skin. Old Man Super Potion belongs to that family — a name a younger man could not have given. It required having been young, having been away, having come back, and having looked at the bottle and decided to be funny about it. There is a whole life folded into the joke. You do not have to unfold it to smell it.

We think about it when we train new instructors. We tell them: if someone names their bottle Old Man Super Potion, or My Wife’s Kitchen, or After the Rain in Quang Nam, do not correct the grammar. Let the label be the label. The label is part of the perfume.

As declanmr wrote on TripAdvisor about his own afternoon with us: “This is a must do activity for couples on a SEA trip!” Couples of all ages. On all kinds of trips. For all kinds of reasons.

Frequently asked questions about a veteran return Vietnam perfume workshop

I’m an older traveller returning to Vietnam after many years — is the NOTE workshop suitable for me?

Yes, and some of our most meaningful sessions happen with guests in their sixties, seventies and eighties. The pace is entirely yours — 90 minutes is the typical session, but nobody rushes you out. The workbench is seated, well-lit, and our instructor will walk you through labels out loud if your sight or hearing isn’t what it used to be. Bác Pat, the guest in this story, worked slowly, adjusted in small amounts, and left with a bottle he named himself. Slow is welcome here.

Where exactly is the NOTE perfume workshop in Saigon, and how do I find it?

NOTE – The Scent Lab’s flagship workshop room is on the 2nd floor of 42 Nguyễn Huệ, the 1960s cafe apartment on Nguyễn Huệ walking street in District 1. We also run sessions at our 34 Nguyễn Duy Hiệu studio in Thảo Điền (Thủ Đức), which has an enclosed, fully air-conditioned room — useful on hot afternoons or if you’d prefer a quieter street. A third NOTE workshop operates inside Lotte Mall Tây Hồ, 272 Võ Chí Công, Hanoi — 4th floor, Store 410, for travellers in the north. All three are bookable at workshop.thescentnote.com/book/.

I want to make a perfume that “smells like Vietnam” — what does that actually mean in the workshop?

It means starting a conversation at the bench rather than pointing at a bottle. Our instructor will introduce you to the Vietnamese raw materials we work with — cinnamon from Yên Bái, pomelo leaf, agarwood, vetiver (hương bài), star anise, osmanthus — and show you how they behave in a formula alongside more familiar notes like bergamot, sandalwood and frankincense. Most guests, like Bác Pat, build a scent that is Vietnamese at the heart but wearable on their own skin, climate and age. There is no single “Vietnam smell” — there is the one you and the instructor arrive at together.

How much does a NOTE perfume workshop cost, and what do I walk away with?

A full session runs around 90 minutes and you leave with a finished bottle of your own formula plus a formula card, so you can reorder by email later. Prices start at 550,000 VND (around $24 USD) for a 10ml bottle and go up to 1,550,000 VND ($64 USD) for a 50ml bottle. The 30ml size at 1,350,000 VND ($54 USD) is our most-booked. All prices are before 8% VAT. Many returning guests choose 30ml or 50ml for a scent they know they’ll keep wearing at home.

Can my partner and I make a perfume together, or should we each make our own?

Both options work, and couples often do a little of each. Many pairs each build their own bottle at side-by-side benches and spend the last fifteen minutes smelling each other’s formulas and adjusting. Others collaborate on one shared scent. Bác Pat and his wife built one bottle together — Old Man Super Potion — with him adjusting on his own skin while she smelled from across the bench, which is a surprisingly effective way to work. You can book one slot for a shared bottle or two slots for individual ones; we’ll set the bench up either way.

Is the workshop appropriate for a DOVE Fund, veterans group, or other slow-travel community visit?

Yes, and we have hosted small groups of returning travellers quietly. For groups of four or more, we recommend booking directly through our website and mentioning the group context in the notes — we’ll block a contiguous slot, assign a single instructor for continuity, and make sure the pace is gentle. The 42 Nguyễn Huệ room comfortably fits six to eight guests with seated stations. We can also arrange sessions at our Thảo Điền studio for slightly larger private groups.

Where can I read more reviews of the NOTE perfume workshop in Saigon?

The most current independent reviews live on TripAdvisor — we maintain two listings, one for the 42 Nguyễn Huệ location and one for the Thảo Điền studio. Both sit at ★4.9 with several hundred reviews across languages. Recent guests include couples on their first SEA trip, returning travellers, and groups of friends travelling together. As Trang M wrote: “Good experienced. Staffs are super friendly and nice. I love this place so much.” Links to both TripAdvisor listings are in the directions box below.

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 in the same family — Vietnamese raw materials, restrained blending, the kind of bottle Bác Pat would nod at — you can browse NOTE’s handcrafted fragrance collection at thescentnote.biz. Same ingredients, same studio, bottled in advance.

Follow us on Instagram at @note.workshop for occasional photographs from the bench. We also publish longer travel pieces — like our last-day-in-Saigon guide and our couples-activity guide for HCMC — for travellers planning the rest of the afternoon.

Details about the session described in this story — including the guest’s name and identifying specifics — have been lightly fictionalised at the guest’s request to protect family privacy. The formula, the bottle, and the name on the label are real. Prices, opening hours and availability are accurate as of writing and may change; please double-check on our booking page before your visit.