It takes many years of training, as well as smelling and recognising over 2,000 ingredients before you can become a scent designer. Founder and CEO of Maison 21G, Johanna Monange would know that, because she worked as a scent designer for some of the biggest fragrance brands around the world and spent 20 years in perfumery before starting her own perfume house.
Johanna Monange is the founder and CEO of Maison 21G.
Monange shares with Daily Vanity in a phone interview that Maison 21G is a revolutionary concept that takes away all manufacturing intermediaries from the traditional perfume industry.
“I will guide you to become your own scent designer,” she explains.
For the first time, customers are able to buy perfume concentrates directly and create a unique fragrance that’s signature to them. Every perfume concentrate at Maison 21G is made with the finest natural ingredients from sustainable, natural, and cruelty-free sources, to ensure that the final product is a high quality fragrance.
If you’re looking to create your signature perfume, the process is simple. A targeted personality quiz interprets data provided by each customer to suggest combinations of scents for three different occasions.
While the personal quiz sorts you into one of the five profiles in the system, Monange assures us that the possibility of fragrances you can create is endless.
“It depends on the message you want to share with the people around you,” she explains. The suggested scents serve as a guide for you to kick off the fragrance creation process, and you will have to smell each ingredient, share what you like or not like about them, and adjust the combination and percentages accordingly. Don’t worry – an expert from Maison 21G will be there to guide you through the entire process.
Monange says that to create your signature scent that reveals who you are, you need to be honest about your preferences and objectives.
You choose the scents that represent who you are and dilute the concentrates you’ve picked with alcohol.
The scent you create, Monange says, should speak to your soul. In case you’re wondering, the brand’s name, “Maison 21G”, is inspired by the concept of the soul. Based on the MacGougall study published by the NY Times, the weight of the human soul is said to be exactly 21 grams.
Once you are sure about the combination that makes up your unique fragrance, you can dilute the concentrates with alcohol to create a 21% concentrate perfume, name it, and use it immediately. Each Signature Perfume is available at SGD69, which is an affordable price that we were very surprised by.
La Source dispenses capsules of concentrates into a bottle in under 30 seconds.
If you’d like to replenish your unique fragrance, the store has a revolutionary machine called La Source, which dispenses capsules of concentrates into a bottle in under 30 seconds. This technology was previously only available in B2B arenas, but it is now available to make it easy for Maison 21G customers to refill their perfume creations.
Monange says that customers should create their fragrance based on their mood or the occasion they intend to wear it to. In fact, she told us that she thinks everyone should have at least five different fragrances in their wardrobe: a long-wearing and fresh day scent for work, a sensual night fragrance for special occasions, a feminine weekend scent that’s relaxing, an energising one that’s more powerful when you need a burst of power, and an aphrodisiac one that’s intimate, sexy, that you know only your significant other would smell.
And there’s never a bad blend, she says, “unless you put in something that you don’t like.”
“It’s just like the question of what wine should you buy? The answer is: the one that you like.”
Maison 21G currently has boutiques in Sydney and Singapore. Its store in Singapore is its flagship boutique, and it’s located at 77 Duxton Rd, Singapore 089536. It is open from 12pm to 8pm daily, except Sundays.
