Seven years, three precious drops, and a family-owned perfume business that helped us recover a childhood memory.
In 2019, not long after my father died, I travelled to Sicily with my mother, husband and children. We stayed outside Palermo on an estate surrounded by olive and orange orchards, overlooking the sea. There was wind all the time, and every day offered another beach, sometimes through a secret gate.
It was one of those rare interludes when grief and beauty occupied the same liminal space. One evening, while eating gelato in the nearby town of Bagheria, we passed a little perfume shop called La Profumoteca. Through the window I could see rows of bottles and mysterious liquids. It looked more like an old apothecary than a perfume counter.
Our daughter was nine, curious about smells, and we thought it would be fun for her to create her first perfume with her father. Something that reflected her age. They emerged with a fragrance made from strawberry and cotton candy. It was sweet, playful and entirely her own.
I assumed it eventually disappeared into a drawer. What I didn’t know was that she had been using it sparingly for seven years. By the time she was 16, she had just three drops left.
“Mom, I need more perfume,” she kept telling me. “It’s my favourite perfume, and I’m never going to get it again.”
She had been calculating when to use those last three drops, saving them for special occasions. That same perfume had accompanied her from childhood into adolescence, through school, friendships and first love.
It reminded me of MacArthur Park, that wonderfully dramatic song from the 1960s about someone leaving a cake out in the rain. The singer laments that he’ll never have the recipe again. A lost perfume seemed to belong to the same emotional universe.
Then one day, cleaning my daughter’s room, I found the bottle. Those last drops were caught inside the little plastic tube of the spray mechanism. The bottle looked almost anonymous, but examining it closely I noticed a tiny sticker: La Profumoteca. Two other labels identified the fragrance notes in Italian: fragola and zucchero filato. Strawberry and cotton candy.
What were the chances this company still existed? I searched online and there it was. Not only was La Profumoteca still in business, it had expanded.
I contacted the company, explained our story and sent photographs of the labels. They said they could recreate the perfume. They also sent information about their family business and offered to ship a sample to Berlin, where I was attending a music festival in October. It arrived at my hostel exactly on time.
When my daughter smelled it, her verdict was immediate. “Mom, it’s perfect. It smells exactly how I remember it.”
Seven years later, the recipe wasn’t lost after all.
La Profumoteca grew from a family fragrance business in Palermo that began producing perfumes for other companies in the 2000s. Its retail concept allows customers to select individual fragrance notes and combine up to three into a personalized scent. The catalogue ranges from cedarwood, myrrh, oud and vetiver to fig leaf, citrus, caramel and cotton candy. The company also offers guided olfactory experiences and develops custom fragrances for brands.
What I love is that perfume becomes playful again. A nine-year-old can choose strawberry and cotton candy and it grew with her.
Better than Le Labo?
The company also sent me Legno di Cedro, a cedarwood fragrance suggested as an alternative to Le Labo’s famous Santal 33. I’ve always loved Santal 33 on other people, but less on myself. Legno di Cedro, surprisingly, smells better on my skin.
It’s woodier, muskier, almost like an oak cask that has held whiskey for 20 years.
Perfume is chemistry, after all, and the same fragrance behaves differently on different people. But it’s satisfying to discover something from a small Sicilian perfumer that I prefer to a famous luxury fragrance.
The greenest bottle is the one you refill
There is another reason I like La Profumoteca: refills. Luxury perfume packaging can involve heavy glass, elaborate caps and layers of cardboard. La Profumoteca offers in-store refills, allowing customers to keep using their bottles rather than purchasing new ones.
It’s a modest but meaningful approach to reducing packaging waste. More importantly, the company makes fragrances people actually want to keep. My daughter doesn’t need a new perfume every season. She wants the scent she chose at nine, and hopefully she can keep refilling it for another ten years.
La Profumoteca now has shops beyond Bagheria, including Palermo, Milan and Solothurn, Switzerland. For me, it will always be that little shop we discovered over gelato in Sicily, where a girl chose the smell of her childhood.
A little dream, three drops of magic, and a family business willing to help make a girl’s dream come true.
Thank you, La Profumoteca.
