Find your perfect scent at the Fume Scent Lounge.

​It’s not every day that you get invited to preview the world’s latest fragrance experience. When I had the option to attend a Davie Lackie  party at Yorkdale Mall’s Hudson’s Bay to test out the first scent installation of its kind I definitely could not say no.

​I’m a lover of perfumes, but find I tend to stick to what I know (Marc Jacobs Divine Decadence is my all-time favourite go-to) and I was curious to see what the scent installation would tell me to try. It was quite simple actually, a Fragrance Finder screen lit up on a countertop asking a few simple questions.  Was the perfume for me, or was it a gift? Was I looking for something masculine or feminine?  Did I prefer floral, fruity, woody or citrus scents? Would I prefer the scent to be mild or bold?
After deliberating and making the best selections for me, three scents popped up on the screen. Love Story by Chloe (nailed it, because I already own this scent!) Chloe’s Fluer de Parfum and Knot by Bottega Veneta. I was surprised to see how accurate the test had been, and turned to a few friends I’d made at the party who told me they were just as thrilled with their results!
I wasn’t familiar with Knot and wanted to test the scent for myself. This is where it gets interesting. Instead of having the perfume sprayed onto those little pieces of paper like you would usually do in a department store, Fume Scent Lounge has these amazing inhalers! They are little open top bottles with beads or wooden like balls with the scent of the perfume on them. They are supposed to mimic what the perfume would smell like on the skin instead of the sometimes overpowering smell that you would get on the pieces of paper and not best representation of the true scent.

​“If you actually interview the perfumers and the bottle designers, they’ve worked sometimes 3 years non-stop on these projects. They’re so proud and they put so much of their life into these creations” Dave told the crowd who were huddled around the counter top, taking in the scents from the inhalers.
 We were in for a real treat when Dianne Sonnenberg, Vice President of Sales & Marketing from Coty also attended the event to explain a little more of what the lounge was going for.  “We still wanted to keep this elevated art form, but make it very modern and new and accessible, we wanted people to try lots of fragrances and sometimes trying lots of fragrances can be an overwhelming experience. Coty is the largest fragrance company in the world so we felt it was a bit of our responsibility to come up with a new way to try fragrances, so we developed these inhalers and re-created some of our best scents in with these beads with scented beaded technology. You’ll notice some are different, so Eternity for Men for example is wooden beads and Boss bottled is crystals. Different textures and different materials will better reproduce the scent, and they last actually over 2 years, these beads.”

​This idea seemed so smart and yet so simple and I could see how customers would prefer testing out scents from the inhalers from now on. So much work had gone into creating these inhalers and they had it down to a science, so why go back now? It seemed like the easiest way to get a real feel for multiple scents instead of being overwhelmed by spraying from the actual bottles.  “When you’re spraying a fragrance, you can basically test 3 fragrances at one time, any more than that and the nose can’t distinguish between the different notes, so it all blends together” Dave told us. He held up an inhaler “With these you can actually test multiple fragrances, and you’re not spraying them and it’s not overwhelming, so that’s what’s really interesting about these”

​If these one of a kind inhalers aren’t enough to tempt you into visiting the lounge, you’ll really want to visit to see the amazing design of the lounge itself. It was created by a husband and wife team who wanted to capture what fragrance would “look like. They wanted to make the invisible visible and the ‘swirl and swish’ looking table and accents around the lounge was meant to look like a wisp of fragrance. Very smart and chic. It makes for a fun atmosphere and I could see myself coming back with some girlfriends to all find our perfect scent and have a little shopping spree.

​If you’re a lover of perfume, I would really recommend checking out the lounge! So far they have scents available from Gucci, Hugo Boss, Tiffany & Co, Chloe, Marc Jacobs, Calvin Klein, Bottega Venata and Miu Miu. There really is something for everyone and I’m sure you would be able to find your own signature scent! Happy shopping!