Sensory Workshop and Audio-guided Museum Visit

A real sensory experience, designed for adults and children aged 11 and over. You touch, smell, look, listen and taste. At each step, something familiar reveals itself differently. Aromatic plants stop being things you look at. They become things you feel.

An unusual way in

Mystery boxes, unexpected textures, sounds you wouldn't normally associate with scent, a tasting conducted entirely without sight: the workshop approaches the world of perfume through a door that's rarely opened. Sensations take over where words fall short. A fragrance surfaces a memory you'd forgotten. And fine lavender discloses a depth that's easy to miss when you're simply looking at a field.

This experience pairs naturally with the museum visit. It deepens your understanding of the relationship between aromatic plants, olfactory memory, perfume-making and the raw materials behind the fragrances in the museum's boutique.

What happens during the workshop

1. The discovery boxes

Participants reach into the discovery boxes. They feel a texture, catch a scent, take in a colour, and try to name the plant or material behind each sensation. What does this texture remind you of? What memory does this fragrance call up? The first stage is simply about listening to your own impressions and trusting what comes.

2. Listening to sounds

The experience moves into sound. Can a sound suggest a fragrance? A texture? A sensation that feels vegetal, soft, cool or deeper? Hearing, smell and touch converge on the same ground — and that ground is the imagination. Fragrance stops being something you analyse. It becomes something you inhabit.

3. The blind tasting

Next comes taste, with a tasting of colourless syrups. Remove the visual cues and everything shifts: familiar reference points blur, habits fall away, and concentration moves entirely to aroma. It turns out that seeing — more than we realise — shapes what we think we're tasting.

4. Creating your perfumed filter

The final stage introduces the structure that perfumers use to build a composition: what top, heart and base notes each contribute, and how they work together. Each participant then creates their own perfumed filter, using the essential oils that go into the fragrances sold in the museum boutique.

This filter is your personal souvenir of the workshop — a composition built from your own sensations and your own nose.