Sweet Fern Pink

One of my favourite places in Ballarat is the fragrance show Sweet Fern. I give it the same amount of love that I used to reserve for the library when I was a child. It’s a place where I can explore who I am, find out new things about the world and escape if I feel I need to.

Sweet Fern now has a darling new owner and is slowly transforming to show the tastes of her heart. It’s a new direction for the little shop, yet still elegant, timeless and tasteful. Each time I visit and see something new it’s exciting to see the new personality of the store taking shape in a new way. One of those is this adorable pink side room which hosts a range of darling fragrances. My favourites like Penhaligon’s, Lubin and Juliette Has a Gun all live in here.

Because I love showing people places in Ballarat that I love and allowing them to see something they might not have seen before, I had to show this really sweet new room off.

Most times when I mention Sweet Fern to people, they have a similar response: they would love to get into perfume but how the heck does someone start that? It’s a reasonable response when some brands have hundreds of fragrances, every celebrity seems to have at least one scent on the market and you can buy perfume at bargain stores. Why would you begin somewhere like Sweet Fern? Because they’ll teach you. 

Sweet Fern does a range of perfume events, but the best one to get started with is a Perfume Masterclass. This event will take you around the fragrance wheel. There are something like 14 different categories of perfume. They’ve got names like aromatic, citrus, soft floral, woody oriental and aqua. The delight in this overload of scents is that it gives you the vocabulary to be able to define what you do and do not like about perfume. Where previously you might find you don’t like sweet fragrances, here you might understand that it’s one particular note that makes you turn your nose up. Then once you know what it is you can avoid it because you know your own nose. Even better, if you go to a perfume masterclass, I’d bet you will walk away in love with at least one scent. You’ll know what part of the fragrance wheel it sits in. You’ll be able to explore why you like it. You may find multiple fragrances that make your heart sing. 

Now that I’ve built up a few scents in my collection when deciding what I’ll wear on any given day, I actually let my heart choose. I see how I’m feeling in the moment and I smell each one. I did this when choosing the scent I would wear on my trip away. I initially chose a beautiful fragrance called Empressa, but as the departure date approached I realised while I loved the scent, it was the wrong one. Because we’ve got access to somewhere like Sweet Fern, I was able to walk in and choose another. I ended up with Juliette Has a Gun’s: Not a Perfume. One day soon I’ll go back for my second choice, Lubin’s: Epidore.

So if you’ve ever wondered about perfume, get introduced to it and explore how the different scents make you feel with a Perfume Masterclass at Sweet Fern.

Big thanks to Liv for being my photography assistant on this day. This meant that I would set the camera up on manual, coach her as we went and try and teach her a few tricks along the way. She also pinned the flowers in my hair, just like this time last year when she played my sister in Pride and Prejudice and before each show she would pin fresh flowers into my bun.

– L

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