Fragrant Stories: Perfume Museum in St. Petersburg

The private Perfume Museum was opened in 2012 in St. Petersburg on Vasilievsky
Island by perfumer, art historian and teacher Elina Arsenyeva. The mission of the Perfume Museum is to preserve the memory of the perfumery culture of the past. The museum houses an extensive library of fragrances – more than 4,000 exhibits. The oldest exhibit is over a century old, the youngest is less than a year.

The museum's collection has been assembled for more than forty years. According to the founder, at first it was unsystematic and focused on Russian perfumery, but beginning in the 2000s foreign fragrances started to appear in the collection. As the collection grew, unique information about the scents accumulated, which later served as the basis for creating exclusive tours. Today the museum's collection is being supplemented with rare perfumes acquired at auctions.

The Perfume Museum is a place where a special atmosphere of calm and harmony reigns: there are
no clocks or phones, and the room is lit with soft lighting. Such an environment promotes maximum immersion in the narration. Tours are conducted in the format of an intimate tea session, by appointment only. The cost of an individual tour is 8,000 rubles, and for groups of two to six people – 3,500 rubles per
person. Tours are led by the museum's founder, Elina Arsenyeva. Ticket prices are determined by the rarity of the exhibits available for tasting and the individualized approach to the tour program. Each tour is discussed with visitors in advance and takes their interests into account. No other perfume museum in the world offers such an approach. If museum visitors have no particular preferences, they will hear a story about perfume
fashion of each decade of the 20th century with a tasting of the most fashionable fragrances of those years.

In addition, the museum offers the opportunity to create your own scent and to learn the basics of perfumery. The uniqueness of the museum's tour programs lies in their one-of-a-kind nature. Over the course of a few hours visitors sample about a hundred different scents. And each time it is an amazing journey. Old fragrances tell astonishing stories, plunge you into worlds of memories and impressions contained in small glass vials. Isn't that a
wonder?