Why DIY fragrance is returning to China

What happened Personalization is becoming one of the clearest growth signals in China’s fragrance market. A 2026 ZVZO Consumer Observation survey found that 67% of consumers want customized scent products, while DIY studios had reached 15% penetration in major cities and fragrance subscriptions counted 6.8 million users. ZVZO expects China’s aromatherapy market to nearly double from more than 46 billion RMB ($6.8 billion) in 2026 to over 90 billion RMB ($13.4 billion) by 2030, representing an 18.5% compound annual growth rate, while separate estimates put China’s perfume market above 50 billion RMB ($7.4 billion) by 2029. Le Labo has shown how laboratory-style preparation and personalized labels can make a standardized formula feel more individual, while The Beast uses atmospheric products to create emotional spaces. At the same time, fragrance DIY workshops and perfume-making salons are emerging as new offline wellness experiences tapping on China's rising experiential and emotional consumption. Domestic players including Chillmore and Shanghai-based Narratus are taking the model further through guided sessions in which customers smell raw materials, explore different accords and adjust proportions to create a fragrance of their own. The appeal extends beyond leaving with a unique bottle. Conventional fragrance retail asks which finished perfume suits the shopper, whereas DIY blending starts with a more personal question: What kind of scent do they want to create? A birthday, relationship or journey can become part of the formulation, giving the final product an emotional meaning that a standardised fragrance is less likely to carry. The Jing Take China’s first wave of DIY perfume studios appeared more than a decade ago but rarely developed beyond small workshops. The latest iteration enters a far more receptive market: the 2025 China Perfume & Fragrance White Paper found that the category grew at a 14% compound annual rate between 2018 and 2024 to nearly 25 billion RMB ($3.5 billion). It also found that 81.1% of consumers now regard perfume as a daily essential, while more than 40% choose fragrances according to mood or occasion to relieve stress. Those figures explain why an activity once treated as a craft-class novelty can now combine education, service, social interaction and product in one transaction. The same report ranked in-store olfactory experience as the leading purchase factor, giving brands a reason to use guided blending to lengthen dwell time, gather preference data and support premium pricing through authorship rather than packaging alone. The commercial problem is that personalization becomes harder to control as a business expands. A founder-led studio can depend on individual judgment, but a chain requires controlled fragrance bases, digital formula records, precise weighing, employee training, ingredient traceability and consistent hygiene. Numerous low-volume formulas also place heavier demands on inventory and quality control than standardized fragrances. Regulation is opening up cautiously rather than removing the barrier altogether. China’s cosmetics personalization pilot now covers 23 provinces, but only qualified cosmetics filers or authorized domestic responsible parties can offer small-batch, in-store mixing of already filed general cosmetics through approved stores. Non-pilot outlets remain excluded, making compliance infrastructure as important as creative freedom. The opportunity does not lie in making every bottle entirely bespoke, but in creating a controlled system that gives consumers enough authorship for the result to feel genuinely personal while protecting quality, safety and margins. As China’s fragrance consumer increasingly value personalization and experience, DIY blending will be judged less by the novelty or social-media appeal of the workshop than by its ability to generate repeat visits, deepen customer knowledge and support premium pricing. The Jing Take reports on a piece of the leading news and presents our editorial team’s analysis of the key implications for the luxury industry. In the recurring column, we analyze everything from product drops and mergers to heated debate sprouting on Chinese social media.

Why DIY fragrance is returning to China

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Why DIY fragrance is returning to China

How Bottega Veneta weaved China’s forever it bag