I was once invited to make my own perfume at a lab in the Midwest. (Don’t judge.) The conditions weren’t ideal. I was worried about missing my flight home, needing to get out of the Midwest for personal reasons: I grew up there. I asked the chemist to throw together some bergamot, orange blossom, amber, and whatever. The result could’ve come straight out of a shopping mall in 1999, with Christina Aguilera belting out of the speakers at Abercrombie. Fail.
Why some people feel the need to create their own perfume may be mystifying. Have they never stepped into Macy’s? Have they never passed through duty-free on a hunt for the world’s biggest Toblerone? There are tens of thousands if not jillions of bottles of fragrance in the world. Surely no one would know that the one you’re wearing is distinctly yours, with its own secret formula locked in a vault in a sovereign nation.
