Polish Backpackers Craft a Middle-East Saigon Perfume at NOTE 42NH

NOTE – The Scent Lab is a perfume workshop in Saigon, Vietnam, where a Polish couple nine months into a Southeast Asia backpacking trip walked in expecting to dislike most fragrances and walked out with a custom 30ml bottle named Marroco. On 14 January 2026, after six months in Thailand and three more in Vietnam, Tomek arrived at our 42 Nguyễn Huệ studio holding a workshop voucher his friend had quietly gifted him from across the world. Ninety minutes later, he was holding a Saigon perfume workshop for travelers bottle that smelled like the spice markets of Marrakech, the leather quarter of Fez, and the bergamot trees of the Mekong Delta — all at once.

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 what happened that afternoon on the second floor of the Cafe Apartment.

A Saigon perfume workshop for travelers — gifted from a friend, halfway around the world

Tomek did not buy himself the workshop. A friend back home in Poland had taken our 90-minute session on an earlier trip to Saigon, decided that Tomek and his girlfriend Aniela would love it, and quietly booked a slot at 42 Nguyễn Huệ before they had even finished crossing the Cambodian border. The voucher was waiting in their inbox like a small, warm dare.

Nine months is a long time to be on the road. Six months in Thailand had blurred into three months in Vietnam, and by the time the couple climbed the worn staircase of the Cafe Apartment to our 2nd-floor studio, they had the particular calm of long-haul backpackers — the kind who no longer count days. They had crossed the Middle East together two summers earlier. They had wandered the souks of Amman and the spice alleys of Istanbul. Their idea of a good fragrance had been quietly shaped by that trip: spicy, but not heavy. Fresh, but not soapy. Clean, but with a story.

So when Aniela opened the message from their friend at home — “I’ve booked you something in Saigon, just trust me” — they laughed, said yes, and added it to a calendar that had nothing else in it but ferry times and bus schedules. A backpacker activity Saigon they hadn’t searched for had searched for them instead.

“I don’t really like perfume” — and other things travellers say before they sit down at the bench

The first thing Tomek told us, when he sat down at the workbench, was that he did not really like perfume. Most fragrances gave him a headache. The ones that did not give him a headache disappeared off his skin within an hour, leaving him to wonder why he had bothered. He had, he confessed, only ever bought two bottles in his life, and he was not sure he could name a single note in either of them.

This is, oddly, one of our favorite ways for a session to begin. Reluctant noses become very good noses very quickly, because they have not yet trained themselves to smell what perfume is “supposed” to smell like. Aniela, sitting beside him with the patient look of someone who had heard this monologue before, gently rolled her eyes and started writing down the names of the bottles she actually wore, the ones from their shared bathroom shelf back home. Bergamot. Pink pepper. Cedarwood. Patchouli. Vanilla.

Tomek looked at the list and frowned. “But I hate patchouli,” he said. “I hate cedarwood. They give me a headache.”

Aniela tilted her head. The instructor, watching the exchange with the small smile our staff get when a discovery is about to happen, asked the question that would unlock the rest of the afternoon: “Are you sure?”

Because patchouli and cedarwood, of course, were in almost every bottle on Tomek’s list. They were in almost every bottle on most people’s lists. They were the spine of modern perfumery — the wood that holds the structure up, the resin that lets a fragrance last past lunch. If Tomek truly hated them, he had been wearing his enemy on his pulse points for years.

What he actually hated, our instructor suspected, was a particular way of using patchouli — the heavy, head-shop, late-1990s way. The way that turns a fragrance into a thick velvet curtain. There was, the instructor explained, a fresher way to use the same molecule. Patchouli paired with leather instead of vanilla. Patchouli lifted with bergamot and a green herbal note. Patchouli used as a whisper of damp earth instead of a shout of cellar floor. “Let’s try one,” the instructor said, and pulled three blotter strips from the rack.

This is the kind of small reframing our 42NH staff are quietly excellent at. A past TripAdvisor guest, Mikhail, captured the same kind of teaching moment from his own session: “Dat was incredibly professional. He guided me through each step, explaining the different notes, blends, and techniques. The ambiance was warm and inviting.”

“Dat was incredibly professional. He guided me through each step, explaining the different notes, blends, and techniques. The ambiance was warm and inviting.”
— mikhail A, TripAdvisor review

Middle Eastern travel memory meets the Saigon workbench

The blotter strips arrived. Patchouli, alone. Patchouli with leather and bergamot. Patchouli with a green note and a curl of fresh ginger. Tomek sniffed the first one and pulled away — “That’s the headache one,” he said. He sniffed the second and his face changed. He sniffed the third and went very, very still.

What he was smelling, he said after a long pause, was not really a perfume. It was a memory. It was the back room of a small shop in the medina of Marrakech, two years earlier, where an old man had been pouring out small bottles of attar from glass jugs into tiny silver vials. The shop had smelled exactly like the third blotter — earth, leather, citrus, something green and unfussy. Aniela, beside him, nodded silently. She had been there too. She remembered the cool tile floor and the dust caught in the late afternoon light. She remembered him buying a vial that he eventually broke in his backpack somewhere outside of Pai, in the north of Thailand, and how the smell had clung to his clothes for three days afterwards before fading.

Suddenly, he had something to chase.

This is the moment in a workshop that is hard to plan for and impossible to fake. We do not write it into the brief. We do not steer guests toward their own past. We just open the doors of our 30+ ingredient library and wait for someone to walk through one of them by accident and find their grandmother, or their honeymoon, or, in Tomek’s case, the back room of a Moroccan medina they had visited on a different continent entirely.

A traveling couple from another past session put it well in their TripAdvisor note about our 42NH studio: “Sofia was attentive and had great knowledge about the scents and pairing. They welcomed us straight away and made us feel comfortable. This is a must do activity for couples on a SEA trip!” Tomek and Aniela were exactly that — a couple on a SEA trip — and they were doing exactly that, falling in love with a scent that connected one continent to another.

“Sofia was attentive and had great knowledge about the scents and pairing. They welcomed us straight away and made us feel comfortable. This is a must do activity for couples on a SEA trip!”
— declanmr, TripAdvisor review

The sweet-note surprise: when wood and leather change the rules

If the patchouli reframing was the first turn in the afternoon, the second was bigger. Tomek had also told us, quite firmly, that he did not like sweet fragrances. They reminded him, he said, of high-school colognes — the cheap, sticky kind that travelled in plumes through the corridors of his teenage years.

But on the bench, the instructor was building tiny composition trials. A green-and-citrus opening. A small sweet heart — a touch of fig, a thread of honeyed plum, just enough to round the edges. A wood-and-leather base, dry and dark. The instructor handed him the third trial and watched his eyebrows.

Tomek sniffed. Sniffed again. Looked at Aniela. Sniffed a third time.

“This is sweet,” he said, slowly. “And I love it.”

The discovery, of course, was not that he had suddenly developed a taste for sugar in a bottle. The discovery was that sweetness — the right kind of sweetness, controlled and short-lived — could behave like a small spotlight, throwing the wood and leather into sharper relief. A fig note over a cedarwood base does not smell like candy. It smells like a leather satchel left out in the sun next to a fruit tree. It smells like a memory of an orchard rather than the orchard itself. It smells, in short, like Tomek’s idea of a good fragrance, only better.

Aniela, who had been waiting for this exact moment, simply said, “I told you.”

This is the kind of unexpected unlocking we see again and again at the bench. Another guest from a past 42NH session, who came in with similarly low expectations, summed up the feeling: “Sara was very helpful and informative throughout the process! A great first time experience.” First-time experiences for adults are a small, quiet privilege — and a perfume workshop is one of the few places where adults still get them.

“Sara was very helpful and informative throughout the process! A great first time experience.”
— Matthew W, TripAdvisor review

Building Marroco: a fragrance that bridges Marrakech and Saigon

By now, the bench was crowded with little glass strips and small numbered vials. Tomek had a clear picture of what he wanted. Something that opened with a Saigon morning and closed on a Moroccan evening. Something he could wear in Warsaw on a Tuesday and not feel like a stranger to himself.

He named the perfume Marroco — a slightly Polish-shaped spelling of Morocco, deliberate, the way you might write a friend’s name slightly differently in your phone so that you know it is yours. The composition was, in the end, surprisingly clean.

The opening was a brisk citrus accord — bergamot at the front, a small green leaf-tear, a hint of pink pepper, and a breath of cardamom to nod at the Middle East. The heart drifted into a tight floral with a small fig note — that controlled sweetness — and a thread of honeyed plum that faded after twenty minutes. The base was where the patchouli reframing paid off: cedarwood for spine, a dry leather note for the medina, and a soft musk to carry it forward into the evening.

It was, in one word, Tomek. He tested it on the inside of his wrist, walked around our 42NH studio with a coffee, came back ten minutes later, and grinned. “This is the first perfume I think I’ll actually finish,” he said. Aniela smelled it and quietly said: “This is what your jacket is going to smell like when you come home.” That is, perhaps, the highest review a perfume can get from a partner of nine months on the road.

If you would like to see how this 90-minute structure works step by step — top, heart, base — our guide to what happens inside a perfume making workshop walks through the full sequence with bench photographs.

Book Your Perfume Workshop →

Why long-haul backpackers keep finding their way to our Saigon bench

Tomek and Aniela were, statistically, our type of guest. Long-haul backpackers — three weeks, three months, nine months — keep arriving at the 42NH studio almost as often as honeymooners. Some come off the night bus from Mui Ne. Some come because a friend back home booked them something they did not ask for.

The reason, we think, is simple. After three months on the road, most travelers have stopped wanting things. They are tired of postcards. They are tired of “must-see” lists. What they do still want — and want quietly — is something to take home that nobody else in their hostel dorm has. A custom fragrance tourist Saigon experience makes a strange amount of sense to a person with a 60-litre backpack and a slightly empty soul. It weighs almost nothing. It costs less than a nice dinner. And it carries Vietnam back home in a 30ml bottle that nobody else in their friend group will own a copy of.

An international guest from another past session put the same idea more simply on her TripAdvisor review: “Very friendly stuff and interesting workshop! You need to spend time here.” The grammar is a little frayed by translation; the sentiment is exactly right. You need to spend time here. Not money, not energy, not effort — just time. Ninety minutes of it.

“Very friendly stuff and interesting workshop! You need to spend time here.”
— Владислава R, TripAdvisor review

And this is the kind of gift perfume workshop Vietnam idea that travels well between friends. Tomek’s Polish friend had not booked them a tour, or a fancy restaurant, or a spa voucher. He had booked them ninety minutes of paying attention to their own noses. That is a much better souvenir of a friendship than a fridge magnet.

42 Nguyễn Huệ: the Cafe Apartment, the second floor, the slow afternoon

Our 42NH studio is on the 2nd floor of the Cafe Apartment building on Nguyễn Huệ walking street, in the heart of District 1. The building is a vertical neighborhood — one cafe per floor, a vintage clothing store above us, a vinyl record shop in the upper levels. Most travelers find us by accident — they came up looking for cherry blossom lattes and found a perfume bench instead.

That afternoon in January, the studio held only a couple of other guests. The light through the front balcony was soft and a little dusty, the way Saigon afternoons are in the dry season. Inside, our studio held that particular hush small perfume rooms generate — the quiet of people concentrating with their noses.

If you are building a wider one-day Saigon plan around the workshop, our guide to unique things to do in HCMC covers the small, hand-made, memory-keyed side of the city that long-haul travellers like Tomek and Aniela tend to gravitate toward. And if you are reading this in Manila and wondering how to design a similar afternoon for a friend visiting you, our story of two childhood best friends reuniting at our Thảo Điền studio is a different bottle, same workbench.

A guest from another past 42NH afternoon described the same neighborhood feeling in her own words on TripAdvisor: “Kty Chin led us through a wonderful perfume making workshop. A beautiful way to spend a breezy afternoon in Ho Chi Minh City and we came away with bespoke perfume.” A breezy afternoon — that is, almost always, the right way to schedule a workshop. Mid-afternoon, after lunch, before the evening’s plans take their shape.

“Kty Chin led us through a wonderful perfume making workshop. A beautiful way to spend a breezy afternoon in Ho Chi Minh City and we came away with bespoke perfume.”
— Sasha K, TripAdvisor review

Things to do Ho Chi Minh City couples — around the bench, before and after

Couples like Tomek and Aniela tend to wrap an afternoon around our 90-minute session, and the Cafe Apartment makes that easy. Most begin twenty minutes early at one of the cafes on lower floors of 42 Nguyễn Huệ — there is a Japanese-style coffee bar three floors below us where they pull a quiet espresso, and a flower-and-coffee studio on the 5th floor where the lattes arrive on small wooden trays.

After the workshop, the couple wandered out into the late afternoon and walked the five minutes to the Saigon Opera House, sat on its front steps for a while watching the light change, and then drifted up into the small lanes of Đồng Khởi for an early dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant a friend in their hostel had recommended. By then, both of them had small spritzes of Marroco on their wrists. Aniela admitted, somewhere around the second course, that she had been hoping the workshop would turn him into the kind of person who wears perfume on purpose. Tomek admitted that he had been hoping the workshop would just not be boring. They had both, by their own measures, won.

For travellers stretching the visit into a full Saigon week, our solo-traveler Saigon Kisses session at 34NDH shows what the same bench looks like in our quieter Thảo Điền studio in District 2 — a different mood, equally good for travellers who want a slow afternoon away from the District 1 bustle.

Frequently asked questions about a Saigon perfume workshop for travelers

Is the 42 Nguyễn Huệ workshop suitable for backpackers and long-haul travellers?

Yes — our 2nd-floor studio at 42 Nguyễn Huệ is one of the most popular Saigon perfume workshop for travelers spots in District 1, and a large share of our guests are long-haul backpackers on month-long Southeast Asia trips. The 90-minute session fits neatly into a single afternoon, and the 30ml custom bottle is small enough to slot into a 60-litre backpack without rearranging anything.

Can I do the workshop if I do not really like perfume?

Absolutely — and we would argue these are some of our favorite sessions. Reluctant noses tend to discover what they actually like rather than what marketing has told them they should like. Tomek arrived in January 2026 convinced he hated patchouli; he left with a custom fragrance built around a controlled patchouli-leather base, and named it Marroco.

How much does a Saigon perfume workshop cost, and what bottle sizes are available?

The standard workshop runs around 90 minutes. Custom 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 — Tomek’s Marroco was a 30ml. All prices are before 8% VAT. Couples and best-friend pairs commonly book two stations side by side.

Is a perfume workshop a good gift to send a friend who is travelling in Vietnam?

Yes — we see this surprisingly often. Friends back home book a slot for someone who is already on the road in Saigon, and then send them the voucher as a small surprise. It is one of the better gift perfume workshop Vietnam ideas precisely because the recipient does not need to carry the gift home — they make the gift while they are here, then take the bottle with them.

How do I get to 42 Nguyễn Huệ, and which Saigon studio should I choose?

42 Nguyễn Huệ is the famous Cafe Apartment on Nguyễn Huệ walking street in District 1 — we are on the 2nd floor (not the 4th — that is a different shop). It is walkable from most District 1 hotels and a short Grab ride from Bến Thành. Our second Saigon workshop is at 34 Nguyễn Duy Hiệu in Thảo Điền, District 2 — quieter, leafier, ideal for solo visits or unhurried afternoons. Both stock the same 30+ professional-grade ingredients.

How long does my custom perfume last, and can I reorder it from abroad?

Your custom 30ml bottle, stored away from heat and direct sunlight, will keep for two to three years. The blend continues to mature for the first six months, with the base notes settling and the heart deepening, so the perfume you wear in your sixth month back home will smell quietly different from the one you bottled at the bench. We keep your formula card on file, so you can reorder a refill or a variation directly through our website at any time.

All guest names in this story are pseudonyms used with permission per our privacy policy. Workshop details and reviews are real and verified.

If you would rather take home a ready-made scent than build one from scratch, NOTE’s handcrafted fragrance collection lives at thescentnote.biz — same ingredients, same craftsmanship, already bottled and waiting.