Perfume: A Lesson in Financial Literacy and Creativity

I was shopping at Amaranth, a high-end grocery store in Alberta, Canada, where I live. I had just paid $329 for one surprisingly small bag of groceries. I looked at the total. I looked at the bag. I tried to reconcile how I could have dropped that much cash on what seemed like so little, then quickly decided not to and headed for the door.

On my way out, I passed a display of artisan essential oils and couldn’t resist testing a few.

I put a dab of Superstar on my wrist and was instantly taken deep into a land of mystery and arousal. There was vanilla, subtle bites of pepper, maybe a little nutmeg. And what was that irresistible something else I was picking up? I exhaled completely and smelled my wrist again.

I looked at the price tag. $39 for five milliliters. Could I?

I mean, wearing it, I would feel like a million dollars. People would detect something as I passed them but never quite understand what had happened. It would become my signature. I would be unforgettable.

I stood there, frozen. Unable to buy it. Unable to walk away. Unable to come to terms with spending more than $40 after tax on a bottle that could have been mistaken for a free sample.

I put more on. I contemplated.

Then I walked away.

Torn from the grips of consumerism, I entered my car like I had just come up for air and could see clearly again. Except the scent had come with me. It was on my wrist and on the cuff of my wool coat, still taking me in as I drove.

How could I have left it behind?

But how could I spend money I didn’t have just to smell good?

But how could I not?

For the next hour and a half, I drove north through icy roads into rural nowhere, going back and forth in my mind. Would I buy it the next time I was there? Could I order it online? Was $39 really that much for something that could make me feel both deeply relaxed and completely alive? How long would five milliliters last? Potentially forever, if I only wore it for important moments and used each drop responsibly.

I arrived home, hung my coat in the entrance and smelled my wrists a few more times before taking a shower.

The next day, I put my wool coat back on and stepped out into a foot of fresh snow.

There it was. The scent that had stopped me in my tracks. It was dizzying.

What had I done?

Seriously, I needed it.

A few weeks later, on my next grocery run, I found myself standing in front of Superstar again. I put it on. I walked around the store with it. I considered the cost from several angles and once again decided that I could not justify spending $40 to help build my new identity.

Or could I?

The scent followed me home again, haunting my coat and taking me into unknown worlds and possibilities of a better life.

If only it were cheaper, I could justify it.

And then I got an idea.

What if I figured out the notes and made it myself?

I started researching. I used AI tools. I looked up the brand and read the ingredients. I smelled the remnants on my coat. I went on Amazon and spent hours looking for the purest, cheapest, most authentic and most extensively reviewed vanilla oil.

I found it.

I ordered it.

It was wonderful.

But it was missing something.

I researched more. Oils. Mixtures. How to bring out the almond in the vanilla. Where the nutmeg might come in. Whether I wanted to smell the patchouli at first or only have it emerge later. Top notes, middle notes, base notes. Suddenly, I wasn’t someone trying to avoid spending $39 on perfume. I was developing a formula. This was alchemy.

I ordered. I received. I blended.

I got it wrong. Then I got it wrong again.

Never add clove oil to anything unless you only want to smell like clove oil.

I found Palo Rosa. Amazing. No one has this, I thought. I do.

I mixed it with the vanilla.

Perfect.

This was it. But could it be more?

Twenty dollars in. Then forty. Then, somehow, $163.

I ordered resins. They were hard to find, which made finding them feel significant. I was onto something.

They arrived.

They didn’t dissolve. I researched.

I bought beeswax and carrier oil. Did you know jojoba absorbs quickly into the skin and can therefore make a scent disappear faster? I didn’t.

Fine. I would make balms.

This would be a thing. My thing.

I kept going.

I began playing with tonka, benzoin, labdanum, and other resins I have since forgotten, trying to find the perfect balance. I mixed them together. I put some on.

Nice. I made a big batch.

I smelled like Dr Pepper. Cherry cola?

What had happened?

I adjusted. I melted. I remelted. I added tiny amounts of things to other tiny amounts of things. I researched. Eventually, finally, I made the perfect solid perfume.

It had cost me $287.

The balm was okay. I never did order that bottle of ethanol alcohol to dissolve the resins and make a spray perfume. And I wouldn’t. So there was nowhere left for me to go.

It has now been well over a year, and I have a cupboard full of essential oils, resins, carrier oils, and the material remains of a brief home-perfumery operation. I have been wearing the original $20 vanilla mixed with the $20 Palo Rosa ever since.

So, financially, this could have gone better.

I could have bought Superstar seven times. I could have placed a bottle in every room, with one left over for the car. Instead, I spent months learning about how fragrance unfolds, how it absorbs into the skin, how human chemistry changes it and how one drop of clove oil can destroy everything you have built.

I opened channels in my brain I didn’t know I had, refined my sense of smell – and learned how to make perfume.

I found a scent that became more personal to me than the one I had wanted to buy. Not because it was objectively better. It probably wasn’t. It was intimate because I knew what was inside it. I knew how it behaved. I had smelled every part separately, mixed them together, pulled them apart and watched them become something else.

And it kept me completely engaged through some long, cold winter months. I researched and experimented and waited for tiny bottles to arrive in the mail. I made things that smelled beautiful. I made things that smelled like seasonal soda. Then, once I felt I had gone as far as I could go, I stopped.

Was that worth $287?

I’m honestly not sure.

I could have spent more than that entertaining myself over the same period. People spend money on hobbies all the time without demanding that the supplies eventually justify themselves as household assets. But because I began this particular hobby as a way to save money, the accounting feels relevant.

A few weeks ago, I was in another grocery store in Edmonton and stopped to smell Superstar.

It was still beautiful, but I couldn’t smell it in quite the same way. It was no longer one mysterious, indivisible thing capable of carrying me into a better life. I had gone somewhere else with fragrance. Into oils and resins, absorption and evaporation, top notes and base notes, skin chemistry and the frightening power of clove.

Superstar belonged to a different configuration. Another possibility. Maybe another time.

The bottle was now $42.

Financially, it remained the best deal I had ever walked away from.

I did consider buying the Superstar deodorant the other day, but opted for a cheaper one with a simpler scent profile. It smells okay.

The perfume journey didn’t exactly end here—at least not in the dimension of creativity and imagination. Check out Lithoscents.