Another day another city, my wife and I decided to visit Grasse, which is about 1h30mins away from Nice. So I had my daily dose of Croissant and Quiche and off we go.
It’s a charming little city, wasn’t too hard to get a cab from the train station. You can always use Uber to get around, saved me so many times in my other travels. All I needed to say was “Perfume” and bam the cab driver knew where to take me.
The Musée International de la Parfumerie was located in the middle of the city.
I loved how they take pride in their perfume culture, the museum is definitely worth spending time there to really understand how it all started. The different flowers used initially like Roses, Lilies, Jasmines…etc to make the fragrances either pastes or sprays. The machines, pictures of workers that worked on picking and separating the petals for production.
My two favorite exhibits of the museum were the smelling booth where you smell the raw materials used, I was surprised to see that they used illicit drugs to mix with the raw materials for the perfumes! you will know what I mean when you visit.
I can comfortablly say that I can identify roughly the ingrediants of today’s perfumes.
The other favorite thing was the showcase of the perfume bottles starting from the late 19th century till today. I saw the Channel no5 bottle and the old perfumes I was using growing up.
The museum also highlights some of the fashion and history in Grasse through the years.
I don’t want to spoil all the fun about the museum, so you can explore it yourself. I do recommend it if you are in Nice, France the next time.
After lunch, we walked down the old city for some shopping, I got my wife a perfume that she couldn’t get any more from Dubai. The trend is changing and most of the old perfumes are not sold anymore, you would need to go to Europe to find them.
Just outside the museum, you can visit the factory’s outlet shop, all the perfumes they have a great, pretty hard not to buy all of them there. Make sure you visit them you will not be disappointed.
One experience I will treasure when visiting Grasse is that the people are so friendly and helpful. I wanted to get a ride back to the train station and Uber was no place to be found on my app. You can stand at a location where you can call a cab, so we asked a local about that, she offered to call one for us. I haven’t experienced that before, I thought that was generous of the local to help us.
Grasse would be a destination for a half day tour, must visit though…
