As my sense of smell STILL isn’t fit for fight (it’s victim of what might either be one mastodont, 2 months and still going strong, cold, or 4-6 consecutive smaller ones) I’m holding off the perfume today. Instead, I want to share a little something I’ve discovered recently. I think I’ve already mentioned that my dayjob has moved and I now work in a different area, close to the very center of Stockholm. To get to know the surroundings I try take a small stroll every lunch break. No special destination, just pick a direction and see what happens. And that’s how I stumbled uppon Stockholms Aeter & Essensfabrik - or in English, ”The Essence Factory”.
This is a 4th generation family business, specializing in spices, spice blends (some for food, but most of them for making schnapps), essences and etherical oils. They also carry a wide assortment of hard-to-find baking ingredients, teas and even a few home blended perfumes. The interior looks like straight out of a museum, but it’s in fine working order.
The brown bottles on the top shelves are all perfume oils. They are very concentrated and made me all dizzy as I tried smelling them straight from the bottle. I think all perfumistas have at some point toyed with the idea of make perfume by oneself (I know, I have), so I’m so happy to have found a place like this where I can actually smell the ingredients beforehand and not have to order blindly from the Intenet.
A visit to Essensfabriken is highly recommended! It’s situated at Wallingatan 14, 111 24 Stockholm (close to Drottninggatan). And if you’re visiting it close to lunchtime on a workday, pop me a mail before and I’ll come and hang out as well 
Images: www.essencefabriken.se and my own.
What an interesting place! If I ever make it to Stockholm, I will look for it.
Yes, it’s a little gem, highly recommended!
”I think all perfumistas have at some point toyed with the idea of make perfume by oneself (I know, I have)” – I haven’t! If not to count the time when I was six or seven and tried to soak rose petals from the Grandma’s garden in order to make a rose perfume
I hope your sense of smell completely recovers really soon. Did your taste suffered as well? Have you lost any weight?
(the only positive thing I could think of for myself ina similar situation)
Haha, I remember taking a little of each of my mothers perfumes and beauty creams and blending them with a tube of toothpaste in order to ”fresh them up” when I was about 8. Needless to say, no one was very impressed by the result
This cold is a weird one, I do taste things and my sense of smell isn’t all gone, but it’s distorted. Scents fade out a lot faster than they usually do and it’s like I feel some notes but not others – which make the perfumes I wear very unbalanced. Therefore I’ve mostly been wearing scents I don’t like that much to begin with, as the good ones would just be wasted on me right now. Sensible, but insanely boring!
And I haven’t lost weight either, it’s like my lack of scent is compensated by me wanting to eat more sugar
Similar to Undina, I’ve never had an urge to create my own perfume, which is odd, considering how much I enjoy playing with wine and seasonings when I cook.
But I hate to measure anything so I would be a terrible perfumer
Still, this shop that you found makes it sound tempting. Do you think you’ll try to make a perfume now, Sigrun?
I do miss perfumes centered around the scents one migt find in the Scandinavian nature, such as elderberry flowers, mock oranges and bird cherry blooms, but I don’t see myself brewing up a perfume based on one of those anytime soon
More realistically, often when I wear a perfume I keep thinking ”This is great but I wish there was some more patchouli, rose, aldehydes, oakmoss etc etc”. It would be great to have some of those around, I could just smear on some extra and hopefully get exactly the scent I crave. And with the upcoming EU restrictions, I probably should stock up in order to fight those new watery reformulation formulas!