Perfume Museum
Saint Petersburg
Contact information
St. Petersburg, 9th Line of Vasilievsky Island, Building 48
Phone: +7 (911) 742-45-02
Operating hours
daily: 11:00-00:00, by prior appointment
Ticket price
Private tour – 6000 rubles/person.
Group tour (2-8 people) – 2500 rubles/person.
Individual perfume creation workshop – 7000 rubles/person.
No discounts.
Exhibition entry is free.
We suggest that children under 12 don’t visit the museum, as it can still be boring and tiresome for them.
The museum is especially interesting for specialists in such fields as fragrance, product packaging, glass design, fashion, and textiles.
The founder and owner of the museum
Elina Vasilyevna Arsenyeva, collector, fragrance critic, perfumer, teacher at the Perfumers School, publisher of the newspapers “Perfumania” and “Private Perfumer”, radio host at Perfume Radio.
Founded
2012
Museum’s goals:
– preservation of the world perfume heritage.
– recreation of fragrance masterpieces.
– revival of the Russian perfumery.
Public activities:
hosting guided tours and workshops, training perfumers, holding perfume exhibitions.
In the Perfume Museum, you can not just see the bottles but actually smell the fragrances. It is the only museum in Russia where you can try the exhibits.
Such museums are called osmotheques, and there are only a few of them in the world.
The concept of the museum is to preserve the memory of disappearing fragrances and the perfume culture of the past. To show not the bottles, but their contents. Not to the eye, but to the nose and imagination. To create not a simple museum, but a magical place where you can forget about time, relax and recover.
That’s why a tour is a 4-5 hour session of fragrance testing while sitting at the table, having tea with sweets. Guests will try about a hundred smells, both fragrances of the past and the ingredients from the museum’s laboratory.
The founder of the museum, perfume historian Elina Arsenyeva welcomes guests and hosts excursions herself. The topic is specified in advance.
The museum’s collection is a living history in bottles: famous authentic fragrances of the 20th century and the best works of contemporary perfumers. Bottles of the Soviet period and foreign bottles of this and previous centuries. The oldest exhibit is more than 100 years old, the youngest is less than a year. There are more than 4,000 exhibits in the collection, ranging from 1910 to the present day.
The museum displays fragrances, not bottles. You should smell them, and not observe through a glass, however beautiful.
