So, we went back to Grasse the next day, just so that we wouldn’t waste our money.

The Fragonard Fabrique des Fleurs factory is outside the city of Grasse, roughly 2.8km from the Fragonard factory within Grasse. It’s located downhill, which makes for an easy 30 min walk to the factory but a harder walk back up. Luckily, since this was the only item on our agenda that day, and we learnt our lesson not to eat until just before the workshop, we managed to reach the factory in good time.

I think the biggest question was: did I understand anything?

• 

• 

• 

The short answer is – not really. The perfume making workshop was broken into 3 parts – 50 minutes for the history of perfume (did you know it originally means “thorough fumigation” because it started with people scenting their clothes?) and how perfumes work (the olfactory pyramid, basically), 50 minutes to slowly sniff and record our thoughts on the 9 types of scents we were going to use, and about 20 minutes to make the perfume. The workshop was supposed to take about 90 minutes, but as you can see, we overran.

I’m really grateful that I was travelling with a friend who could understand French, so she was summarising the first part of the workshop for me. For the second part of the workshop, I was pretty happy to be able to understand about 15%~20% of what was spoken! I think it helped that the teacher was describing the scents so it the sentences felt shorter and I was able to catch more phrases.

And even though this was billed as a “make your own customised perfume” workshop, we were instructed on what base to make – using all 9 scents, we made a citrus base that was about 65ml. That leaves about 35ml for you to customise your scent. So if you really, really prefer something else, you might want to ignore this and just make the scent based on what you like from smelling the nine scents!

At the end of the workshop, we were given a signed certificate as a memento. We also got to keep the aprons and the little booklet that we received when we entered the class.

All in all, this was a very interesting immersion experience for me! I was reminded of my first few months in Japan, where I didn’t understand much, and it has motivated me to continue learning French so I can understand more.