Inside a Perfume Workshop Saigon: Three Polish Friends, Three Scents

NOTE – The Scent Lab is a perfume workshop in Saigon, Vietnam, where travelers create, not buy, their own custom fragrances inside a 1960s cafe apartment on Nguyễn Huệ walking street. This is a perfume workshop Saigon travelers have been quietly recommending to their friends for years — and on a Wednesday afternoon in January 2026, three friends from Poland sat down at the same workbench and left, ninety minutes later, with three completely different perfumes — each one telling a story their owner didn’t expect to tell.

This is how it happened.

A perfume workshop Saigon afternoon, from the inside

The second floor of 42 Nguyễn Huệ has a smell before you see anything. Old plaster, coffee from the cafes one balcony over, and the quiet drift of rose and cedar coming from the open door at the end of the corridor. If you’ve never been to this building — a concrete apartment block built in the mid-1960s, now colonised by independent cafes, bookstores and tiny studios — the first thing that surprises you is that it’s still a residential building. People still live here. The lifts still creak. The window frames still have the original pastel paint, faded by sixty years of afternoon sun.

We’re here most afternoons, six days a week. We being Yến, who runs most of the workshop sessions at 42NH, and whichever travelers happen to have booked the 2pm or 4pm slot through our website that day. On 14 January 2026, Yến was teaching when three young Poles walked in together — Tumas, his girlfriend Kate, and their friend Magical — along with a quieter fourth guest, Victoria, who slipped in a little later by herself. Nobody knew yet that two of the scents made that afternoon would become stories we’d keep retelling.

Let us back up and tell you what actually happened at the table.

Three friends, one table, nine months of Southeast Asia

Tumas and Kate had been travelling for nine months straight. Six in Thailand, three in Vietnam. Before that — further back, a year or more — they’d spent weeks in the Middle East, drifting through Oman, Jordan, the edges of the Gulf. That was where they first fell for a certain kind of fragrance: spicy but dry, warm but never heavy, something that reminded them of the wind across a souk at dusk. They couldn’t name the notes. They just knew they wanted that feeling.

Magical — Polish too, a friend from home — had joined them for the Vietnam leg. He didn’t wear perfume. He didn’t, as he told Yến with a shrug and a smile, really think about scent at all. He was just along for the ride.

A friend back home had been to our workshop months earlier and loved it so much she booked this session for the three of them as a gift — the kind of gift that travellers don’t forget because it arrives already bound to a place. They found us, she told us on Kate’s behalf in an email, because the friend had “booked directly on your website.” That’s a detail worth pausing on, because it’s the beginning of why this afternoon turned into three stories instead of three receipts.

Yến started them the way she starts every group: with a short walk through what perfume actually is, chemically, culturally, emotionally. Top notes, heart notes, base notes. Why something so light can turn so deep on your skin thirty minutes later. Why two people who wear the same bottle never smell the same. Then she laid out the ingredients — over thirty raw materials, each one in a labelled glass vial — and said the only instruction that really matters at 42 Nguyễn Huệ: take your time.

Tumas: the skeptic who discovered he loved what he didn’t know he loved

“I’m not really a perfume person,” Tumas said early on, in that unapologetic tone people use when they’ve already decided the activity isn’t for them. He had reasons. Patchouli gave him headaches. Cedarwood smelled flat to him. Most bottles he’d worn bled away after an hour. He’d started to suspect the whole category was a polite scam.

Yến didn’t argue. She just asked him to do the mini-game where you smell a blind strip and try to name what you’re smelling. Tumas got cedarwood and called it chocolate mint. (Justin, the other tall guest at the next chair over, had also called cedarwood “chocolate mint” earlier — apparently it’s a more common pairing than we realised, and one of our best running workshop jokes.) When Yến told him it was actually cedarwood, Tumas laughed, picked up the vial, and smelled it again on its own. Then with leather. Then with a drop of honey on paper. Something in his face changed.

Here’s the thing. Tumas’s two most reliable “I don’t like these” notes — patchouli and cedarwood — turned out to be in almost every perfume he already wore. He just didn’t know their names. And isolated, on their own, they had always been the problem. But placed next to leather, and then drifted over with a quiet trail of honey and wheat, they turned into something he’d been unconsciously chasing for years.

He named the bottle Marroco. Not Morocco, not a place he’s actually been — but the idea of somewhere warmer than Poland, dryer than Thailand, somewhere between the Middle East trips and this Saigon afternoon. He took home a 10ml bottle. Kate ordered a full 50ml of hers. “That’s how you know,” she said to him, grinning.

Kate: the active questioner and a fig tree she didn’t expect

If Tumas arrived skeptical, Kate arrived curious. She asked more questions in the first ten minutes than most people ask across a full session. Her taste was more defined: she wanted the spice to come forward, clearer than Tumas’s dry warmth, and she didn’t mind if the sweetness climbed almost as high as the wood. But she also had opinions about what she didn’t want — Moroccan rose, lavender, anything that reminded her of a grandmother’s bathroom cabinet.

Yến suggested fig tree and wet amber. Kate pulled a face. Fig tree sounded like it would smell green and sour to her, like the rind of something unripe. Wet amber sounded redundant. She let Yến paint the combination on a strip anyway.

Ten seconds. Fifteen. She smelled it once, then again, closer. She handed it to Tumas without a word.

“Oh,” Tumas said.

She called her bottle Makaresz ’26 — her own surname, anchored to the year. Fifty millilitres, filled to the top. That part matters. Our 50ml size is what we call the confidence tier, because it’s usually what people order when they already know this bottle will come home with them as one of the things they keep. Kate wasn’t planning to order 50ml when she walked in. She was planning to try something small and see how she felt. The fig tree surprise is what changed her mind.

As Celine, a TripAdvisor reviewer who came on a rainy afternoon last year, wrote about us: “Making perfume in a space with fresh flowers on a rainy afternoon is romantic.” The 14th of January wasn’t rainy for the Polish trio — the sky was high and dry and bright over Nguyễn Huệ walking street five floors below — but the romance was still somewhere in the mix, and by the end Kate was writing the name on her bottle’s label in her own handwriting. That handwriting is in the photo archive now. We kept it.

Magical: the blank-page traveller who found honeysuckle

Magical, meanwhile, was the most interesting person at the table — precisely because he had the least opinion. He’d never thought about perfume. He wasn’t going to buy any. He was here because his friends were here. And that turned out to be the freest possible starting point.

Without any pre-loaded preferences to protect, Magical just smelled everything. He wrote down notes on the formula sheet in Polish so he could tell the notes apart later, and kept circling back to a particular vial. He couldn’t translate the English name. He picked up his phone, opened a photo of a flower from his hometown park, and showed it to Yến. “This,” he said. “The Polish word is something like wiciokrzew.”

It was honeysuckle.

Once the name was pinned down, he built a summer in a 30ml bottle — honeysuckle leading, green note and hedion for lift, a slim base of tonka and fig to hold it. He kept comparing his strip to Tumas’s, and realised with some surprise that both of them had gravitated toward the same kind of flower without planning to. He called his bottle 2437. He didn’t say what the number meant. We didn’t ask. Some things don’t need explanation inside a 90-minute session.

Across the table, a fourth guest — Victoria, who had arrived late — was finishing her own bottle in what looked like a race. She’d come with a clear request: a cross between a Tom Ford woody rose and a Diptyque she already wore at home. She finished her formula in under fifteen minutes. “I knew exactly what I wanted,” she said, quietly pleased. Sometimes a workshop ends in discovery. Sometimes it ends in confirmation. Both count.

Travellers from Eastern Europe often tell us the same thing afterwards. One wrote on TripAdvisor: “Very friendly stuff and interesting workshop! You need to spend time here.” That’s the kind of review that sounds simple until you realise what it means — that the guest came in with a tight schedule and left feeling the time had been bigger than the clock.

Why 42 Nguyễn Huệ changes the workshop, not just the location

You could run a perfume workshop Saigon travellers remember anywhere. A hotel conference room, a hipster studio in Thảo Điền, a mall corner. We know because we also run workshops at our Thảo Điền studio and inside Lotte Mall in Hanoi, and each place has its own gravity. But 42 Nguyễn Huệ does something to a 90-minute session that the other rooms can’t quite reproduce.

Part of it is the building itself. The cafe apartment, as locals call it, is one of the few places in District 1 where you can still walk through a mid-century Vietnamese residential layout — not a renovation, not a recreation, but the actual bones, staircases, balconies and peeling paint of a time when the Vietnamese middle class lived here. The staircase echoes. The lift sometimes gets stuck. The neighbours upstairs are real neighbours.

Part of it is the 2nd-floor perspective. The windows open directly onto Nguyễn Huệ walking street, and on a good day you can hear a busker two blocks away before you can see him. The afternoon light is uncomplicated — it comes in sideways, across the workbench, and turns the tester strips faintly gold.

And part of it is that Yến, our instructor at 42NH, has been doing this long enough to read the room. She knows when someone like Tumas is about to give up, and she knows how to hand them the exact strip that will change their mind without making it feel like a trick. As Vannarath, one of our past guests, wrote on TripAdvisor: “This perfume making class was so much fun! Yen (Chloe) was a great teacher who was very friendly.” That’s the kind of praise you can’t buy or staff-train. It happens because the instructor actually cares — and for anyone wondering about the name: Chloe is Yến’s English name, used interchangeably by visitors who find it easier to pronounce.

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What happens to a scent after the workshop ends

Tumas, Kate and Magical walked out onto Nguyễn Huệ that afternoon with three small bottles wrapped in paper. They were planning to spend their last few days in Vietnam tying up other parts of the trip — a final meal, a final bus, a final sunset from the roof of a hostel somewhere in District 2. That’s the usual shape of a last week in Saigon. But the bottles don’t follow the trip’s timeline. The bottles follow a different one.

This is the quiet thing we don’t put on the booking page: the scent you make at our workshop will keep unfolding for six months. You’ll wear it in the airport. You’ll wear it in the first winter day back in Europe and it will hit your skin differently than it did in the Saigon humidity. You’ll catch a trace of it in a scarf you didn’t wash before flying home, and suddenly you’ll be standing in 42 Nguyễn Huệ again, with the sun coming in sideways and Yến handing you a fig-tree strip. That’s not marketing copy. That’s how scent memory actually works — and it’s why people like Sarah, another past guest, wrote: “A wonderful experience! I learnt so much and had so much fun.” Fun is what people say out loud. The memory part is what happens later, without anyone asking permission.

A friend of Kate’s, back in Poland, is the one who gifted them this workshop in the first place. That friend had booked through our website six months earlier, on a solo afternoon, and left with a bottle she still wears. We’re not a secret. We’re a recommendation that travels along friendships. That’s the funnel we most want to protect, because when someone’s friend tells them “you have to do this when you get to Saigon,” it’s never about convenience. It’s about trusting that the afternoon will matter. Another TripAdvisor reviewer, declanmr, said it in one line after his own afternoon with us: “This is a must do activity for couples on a SEA trip!” The friend who booked the afternoon for her friends. The couples who come and then come back. The repeat pattern is the whole point.

Frequently asked questions about the perfume workshop in Saigon

How long does the perfume workshop at NOTE take, and how much does it cost?

A full session runs around 90 minutes, though guests often stay longer because nobody rushes you out. 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 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 option. All prices are before 8% VAT.

Do I need any perfume experience to join a workshop at 42 Nguyễn Huệ?

No. In fact, some of our best sessions happen with guests who arrive telling us they “don’t really wear perfume.” Our instructor walks everyone through the basics — top notes, heart notes, base notes — before you ever touch an ingredient, and the first fifteen minutes are designed to train your nose. Tumas and Magical from the session you just read about had almost no prior knowledge, and both left with bottles they still wear. The workshop is built for curious beginners, not trained perfumers.

Where exactly is the NOTE perfume workshop in Saigon?

NOTE – The Scent Lab’s flagship workshop room, where travellers create their own custom perfumes, 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 where guests create their signature scents at our 34 Nguyễn Duy Hiệu studio in Thảo Điền (District 2), which has an enclosed, fully air-conditioned room — useful if you’re coming during the hot months. Both locations are roughly a 10-minute taxi ride from each other. A third NOTE workshop operates inside Lotte Mall Tây Hồ in Hanoi for travellers in the north.

Can I book a NOTE workshop for a couple or a group of friends like the Polish trio?

Yes — and it’s one of the most common ways people come to us. Couples, trios, groups of friends travelling together, families, birthday parties, small corporate outings (we’ve hosted partner gatherings too). Every guest gets their own workbench station and their own finished bottle, so a group of three leaves with three completely distinct perfumes the way Tumas, Kate and Magical did. Booking ahead is recommended — especially on weekend afternoons — and you can reserve your slot directly on workshop.thescentnote.com/book/.

What if I don’t know what kind of perfume I want before I arrive?

That’s most of our guests. You don’t need a plan. Our instructor guides you through a mini-game at the start that trains you to tell notes apart — cedarwood from sandalwood, fig tree from bergamot, tuberose from jasmine — and by the time you start blending, your nose has already done most of the work for you. Magical, from our Polish trio, showed up with no perfume history and left with a honeysuckle-led summer scent he hadn’t known existed. That’s the default arc, not the exception. Pick your slot and come empty-handed.

Looking for a ready-made scent instead of making one yourself? Browse NOTE’s handcrafted fragrance collection at thescentnote.biz — the same ingredients and craftsmanship, bottled in advance.