Ever wanted to create your own scent?

I feel like every celebrity and their dog (for the record, my dog Ziggy has a Cesar Millan dog scent – no joke, they sell it at Canadian Tire) has their own scent. I feel like for any beauty fanatic, creating your own special scent has to be on your bucket list.

Well, thanks to B.C.-based Escents, you totally can.

I was invited to Escent’s media preview in honour of their first Manitoba location opening up in Polo Park Mall yesterday to hear all about the products and to create my own scent at their blending bar. If you’ve never heard of Escents, they are a Vancouver-based company with 13 retail stores in Canada and over 40 in Asia, as well as an e-commerce site. The company was founded on the idea that nature has the power to provide for all our needs. Using essential oils and other plant-based ingredients their products include a wide range of bath, body, wellness and home fragrance items (in fact, there’s over 200 products total).

Most of the items we saw in store were essential oils, which are 100 per cent natural and are a pure therapeutic grade sourced from all over the world with blending done locally here in Canada.

After checking out the store and learning all about the products, including the super-popular aroma diffusers (I need one of these in my life stat), we were taken over to the blending bar where we got to create our own unique roll on and body lotion.

We chatted with Silvia Enescu, who is a scent specialist with Escents from Vancouver, who walked us through each aroma and consulted what exactly we were looking for. It was tough nailing down a few scents that would actually go good together.  I really wanted to use their rose oil but then I smelled the vanilla and fell in love. Silvia recommend bergamot instead and then we chose one more to get a nice floral sweet smell. For the lotion I wanted to do something stress relieving (which they have a scent for already which consists of neroli and bergamot) and then I did some vanilla in there to sweeten it up and give a twist on it.  The process of creating the scent and lotion was an experience also, since they just take unscented lotion, body butter or perfume in a roller-ball form, and then you add a certain number of drops to the product. We started with either 10 or 20 drops and then went from there. What was too overpowering? What did we need more of? It was a really interesting process.

I think this is such a cool concept and totally unlike anything else I have seen here in the city. I know of other essential oil shops but none that let you create a unique scent, special to you. Not only was it a blast do it, but hey, if you are looking for a great gift, this would be it (this smell totally reminds me of you…)

The official opening for Winnipeg’s Polo Park location is tomorrow, October 3 from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and you’re definitely going to want to stop by. The first 100 guests will receive a complimentary gift and there will be free gift bags all day when you spend $60 or more.

In celebration of Winnipeg’s first Escents store, I teamed up with them to give away an Essential Oil Starter Kit. Enter via the Rafflecopter below; Canadian residents only! Contest closes on October 17, 2015.  Good luck!

a Rafflecopter giveaway
Have you been to an Escents store?