Essence of Experience

A Tribeca perfumery bottles more than fragrance.

Heart notes of late night halal, the dry musk of fresh cigarettes, the nauseating odor of the M21’s exhaust pipe: New York’s very own perfume. The stench, spritzed far into the corners of urban life, is enough to call home any longtime resident.

“People don’t think about [scent] until they lose it,” said Sue Phillips, a slender, middle-aged woman with a voluminous blonde updo. “Or until they smell something bad.”

Phillips opened The Scentarium, a perfumery on Franklin Street in Tribeca, in 2014. Celebrity clients like Zendaya, Katie Holmes and Snooki quickly popularized the business as a destination for creating personalized fragrances. While customers leave with a bottle of their own creation, the experience, said Phillips, also cultivates an appreciation for scent itself.

“It is our most powerful sense,” she said. “It is totally undervalued.”

Phillips’ fascination with scent began when her mother, an avid perfume wearer, developed dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

“When I shared different scents with her, her eyes lit up,” she recalled. “There was a connection.”

According to a 2012 study by researchers at Utrecht University, memories triggered by scent are more powerful than those triggered by other senses. Proximity of the olfactory system to the limbic system, which regulates emotion, likely accounts for the effect.

“The memory aspect is so important to fragrance,” Phillips said.

Her mother’s floral paintings hang in honor on the walls of the perfumery, an intimate basement room adorned by polished woods, burgundy leather and glass bottles. Phillips arranges perfume blends used in the creation process atop a table, ordering them according to her four fragrance families: fresh, floral, woodsy and spicy.

Clients are first assigned their families through Phillips’ Scent Personality Quiz, developed with a psychologist to predict family preferences with 99 percent accuracy. Does the wearer enjoy early mornings or afternoons? Monet’s Water Lillies or Limoges china?

“Fragrance, it really reflects who you are,” she said. “It’s a wonderful way of … getting to know each other.”

The Scentarium frequently hosts corporations, like Google and AOL, for team building retreats. With the arrival of the June wedding season, Phillips also entertains a heavier number of young engaged couples and bachelorette parties.

“To me, it’s important to give students, particularly these millennials, an education,” she said.

As she distributes sample strips dipped in the contents of each tabletop vial, she dispenses subtle notes of wisdom, too. Chanel’s iconic “№5,” for example, developed accidentally from a perfumer’s enthusiasm for aldehyde, a striking, pungent chemical. Fragrance, furthermore, must be applied to the ankles and backs of knees for lasting effect: heat rises throughout the day from the body’s pulse points.

“Simply spray and walk into it, and who are you wearing it for?” she said. “The birds?”

She carefully pipettes each clients’ selection into a delicate bottle. Shark Tank’s Daymond John is one of her most recent clients.

Spice, vanilla, moss and a “fresh sporty note,” she recalled of his scent. “Very sophisticated.”

She caps and labels the bottle before placing it into a small golden pouch.

“It’s a creation of art and science,” she said. “It’s the power of the intangible.”