"Bespoke" perfume might just be the ultimate indulgence of the senses. Katherine Kizilos inhales.

PERFUMER Emma Leah says sometimes, when a person is moved by a fragrance, the first sniff makes them shiver a little. Another tell-tale sign of rapture is to tip your head back, close your eyes and inhale deeply.

Leah and her works can be found at Fleurage, a small, art-deco style boutique in South Yarra that she set up six months ago with her partner, designer Rob Luxford.

Each of the 45 fragrances for sale at Fleurage was made by Leah, who hand-mixes them herself from botanical ingredients. When inventing a fragrance she follows a brief of her own: Dryad, for instance, is designed to evoke a forest nymph; Gardenia, her most popular fragrance so far, smells like the flower; Gypsy is what Leah describes as a "heavy oriental".

In addition, Leah will make "bespoke fragrances" to suit a customer's taste, skin and personality. For $1000, including a $400 consultation fee, Leah will make up a perfume to be worn on a special occasion or as a signature scent.

To do this, she meets a client three times. On the first appointment she will ascertain a client's taste by asking them to rate 13 essential oils, to list scents they have enjoyed, everyday odours they love (and dislike), favourite flowers, colours and seasons — even preferred music styles and travel destinations. Leah will then go to work, making up about three samples for a client to take home and wear on their skin. The final selection is aged in the salon for about a month, the recipe stored on the client's personal file. Later recreations of the scent can be made for $300.

Generally speaking, people's sense of smell is somewhat underdeveloped, Leah believes, leaving consumers open to manipulation at worst, or simply to confusion as each season more perfumes are launched and promoted. Leah and Luxford question what leads us to buy a particular scent. Is it because we like the smell? Or is it the look of the bottle? Or because we have been dazzled by the multimillion-dollar advertising campaign?

To make the point that in the world of commercial perfumery, hype can outpace reality, Luxford reads a passage from Chandler Burr's latest book The Perfect Scent (Burr is a journalist and scent reviewer in The New York Times). In the passage, Burr describes scent company executives praising samples of a new fragrance. Eventually someone in the room says he can't smell anything at all. The fragrance designer checks the bottle from which the samples were taken and discovers that it was filled with coloured water for a photo shoot.

Leah says one of her hopes for Fleurage is that people will use the salon to explore their sense of smell, which for her is a colourful and alluring world. She says she began to make up scents as a teenager experimenting with essential oils. "I have not studied under anyone — you have to go to Europe to do that. I am self-taught," she says.

Leah says that as far as she knows, the service she provides is unique in the southern hemisphere. The boutique, with its dark shelves filled with perfume bottles, and its frosted window with an art deco motif, evokes a luxurious atmosphere, a fantasy world devoted to beauty and pleasure. "We really want to focus on the sensuality of the product," says Leah.

Fragrance evaluator Erica Moore spends her professional life sampling new perfumes and classifying them according to a system devised by her boss, Michael Edwards (his Fragrances of the World is an internationally respected perfume guide).

She says the concept of a bespoke perfumery harks back to the old notion of a "signature scent", which had more currency in an earlier age when perfume was a luxury item only a few people could afford. (For instance, the beautiful Irene in John Galsworthy's novel cycle The Forsyte Saga was associated with the scent of violets.)

In addition, "most of what is widely available is fairly generic", says Moore. If, as a consumer, "you don't submit to fashion or trends" in fragrance, then you might go to a specialist perfumer to find a scent that you like, she says. Moore observes that department stores — where most people buy perfume — can be busy, overwhelming places that don't offer "the perfume-buying experience that some people want to have".

Modern perfumers work with synthetics but Leah prefers botanical ingredients and uses them exclusively. Moore, who was laboratory- trained, says the decision not to use synthetics limits what a perfumer can do, but at the same time, she says: "I can tell a perfume that is made only from naturals."

She says couture perfumeries have become more fashionable in Europe and the US, where there is also a renewed interest in perfumes made from natural ingredients. These tend to be more expensive, but also carry a history and are rich with associations. Rose, for instance, is a flower, a colour, a symbol or perhaps how our grandmother smelled on Sunday afternoons.

Sydney-based fragrance designer John Lambeth says a modern fragrance that uses synthetics is like ikebana — the highly stylised Japanese flower arrangements which might contain a single flower — whereas perfumes made from natural ingredients are more like an old-fashioned bouquet.

"Natural smells are different — they are more intense, richer, botanical smells … I don't have the words, to be honest," says Moore.

www.fleurage.net.au