I finally paid a visit to Bloom Perfumery in Covent Garden. I had heard a lot about it, a friend of mine worked there as an assistant for a while, and Bloom’s owner, Oksana Polyakova, kindly offered to show me some fragrances after hours. It was, as sometimes happens, a beautiful sunny evening, and the crowds around Covent Garden were impressive and mostly French. You can infer European school holiday dates, different in each country, from the statistics of London crowds. The AI picture above gives an imperfect impression of the shop, a large cube lined with brick walls and hundreds of perfume bottles arranged by brand. Oksana is not only, and by a large margin, the most knowledgeable niche perfumery expert I’ve met, but also the most passionate about fragrance. The first comes with the job, the second is rare, precious, and hard to sustain in the long term.

We sat across two sections of rectangular concrete tubes that serve as counters, and in a couple of hours, she showed me maybe eighty fragrances, until my nose gave out. At my request, she arranged them from left to right in a half-circle: the ones that customers love on the left, the ones she loves on the right, and some overlap in the middle. I noticed she used narrow smelling strips and sprayed them from about eight inches away, which seems like a good dosage for a smelling marathon. I asked her a million questions about the demographics of different perfume genres, and we had a good laugh about their quirks. She is originally from Southern Siberia, and she has a dry Russian accent, but can imitate various English idioms to perfection.

I learned a lot in those two hours. In no particular order: Niche is booming. What we used to call niche is now coopted into department stores, and mostly dull. What we used to call artisan is now a good part of niche, the rest being small startups employing perfumers, often famous ones. Oksana was of the opinion that the barrier to entry to starting a perfume brand had recently been lowered, likely because of direct internet sales. She gets offerings from new brands at the average rate of one a day. The stuff comes from as far afield as Kazakhstan (OK frags, nice bottles) and some notable fragrances came from Poland and the Baltics. There were also tiny firms all over the place of artisan perfumers doing great stuff, and even some artisan compositions (more about which later) exclusive to Bloom.

Pricing: anywhere from ≈ £100 to £400, the upper end being reserved to things with super fancy (and invariably hideous) stoppers and non-stock bottles. Some of the worst offenders, I am sorry to say, were Italian firms. Oksana explained that even twelve year olds come in with their parents and ask for a specific fragrance. This often happens after some YouTube video. The usual tribes visited Bloom. Those in search of the edgiest fragrances to wear to a party; those desirous of fragrances acting as a babe-magnet-tractor-beam (Oksana mentioned another term, which I had hoped was obsolete); those wishing to break a lifelong habit of light florals (according to Oksana they invariably walk out with a light floral); customers from the Gulf who state a determination not to go for the usual oud-amber-rose (ditto).

Among the new non-artisan brands, Korea was a big presence with cute names, striking packaging and hit-and-miss but definitely adventurous smells. Oksana said that the trend cycle (vanilla yesterday, cherry today, sake tomorrow) was now approximately four months long. It was fascinating to smell so many diverse things in a relatively short time. I mentally divided the fragrances in three categories ranked by their position, so to speak, in my mental space. Some were on the smelling strip, and whether good or bad, stayed there. Some, by sheer charm and persuasion, seemed to enter my head and dance around in there. And a few did that, but also surreptitiously altered the way I felt, and put new ideas in my head that were absent seconds earlier. In a nutshell: some perfumes are smells, some are music and some are souls.

I walked home with nineteen samples painstakingly decanted and labeled by Oksana. In the next few posts, I will explore them and, whenever possible, their makers. In the meantime, let me say this: There are a million reasons to visit London. Bloom Perfumery, for readers of this blog, may well be in the top ten.