Lily’s recently given us her latest fragrance fave; she’s inspired me to share my own perfume travails.  I am painfully picky about scent.  Vetiver annoys me.  Patchouli makes me want to throw things.  Of a fairly substantial collection of Sephora purchases, I only ever wore Bvlgari’s White Tea and a couple of lily-of-the-valley perfumes that Dior has maddeningly discontinued. My salvation? The Memoire Liquide fragrance bar at Henri Bendel. (Also at Fred Segal in Los Angeles.)  Memoire Liquide lets you compile your own perfume on the spot from a collection of dozens of individual components so that you can make a scent that’s uniquely your own.  If you like perfume, I cannot tell you how much fun this is!

Now, it’s fun to go and wallow, but I recommend going with a specific goal in mind.  Frankly, there are only so many different scents you can possibly smell before a) they all start smelling the same, and b) you give yourself a splitting headache.  Pick something specific that you need – exotic and spicy for winter, or fresh and green for daily wear – and then you can play around enough to settle on something you like without having to smell every single bottle on the display.

Prior to my first visit, I had been looking in vain for months for a citrusy fragrance that I could wear on a daily basis that wouldn’t leave something I didn’t like behind when the citrus faded.  I tried on a whole slew of citrus-based perfumes over the course of months, and while I liked a lot of them at first flush, virtually all of them became unpleasant after I’d worn them for a while.  Once I heard about the fragrance bar, it seemed like a slam dunk: what better way to avoid unpleasant undernotes than to assemble it myself?

The fragrance bar is on the second floor balcony, with a great view of the Lalique windows.  Bendel has the scents arranged by groups (citrusy, woody, green) so that you can navigate the scores of bottles and retain your sanity.  For the most part, the individual components aren’t single-note scents either, and many of them would make pleasant perfumes by themselves.  Figuier, for example, is described as including “[t]artly fresh green Fig with notes of verbena leaf, Green grapes and plum.”  After romping through the citrus notes, I settled on blood orange as the citrus note, and tried various woody and green notes to go along with it.  My own personal recipe?  Well, it involves blood orange and “bois de figuier,” and only the folks with the files at Bendel can tell the balance.  When the initial burst of orange fades, it leaves behind a green scent, and then eventually a light wood aroma that’s the only thing left behind after 24 hours.  Finally, a perfume I can wear every day!  At $45, it was practically worth it just for the fun of making the perfume, and the little roll-on vial I bought has lasted me for months.  I’ve been back since to make a spicy incense-laden perfume for the holidays.

Now, I know that they always recommend that you do this, so it’s old news, but let me stress again: try it on.  Take a stroll around the store (I promise there will be no shortage of lovely things to look at).  Give it half an hour and see how you like it once it’s had a chance to settle into your skin.  My final decision was definitely influenced by how the perfumes smelled after I’d finished shopping, and I was glad I waited to buy until I had that perspective.

Tags: fragrance, Henri Bendel, Memoire Liquide, Perfume

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 11th, 2009 at 8:05 am and is filed under Schmears. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.