Cedar

Cedar is the north of England's entry on this list, and at £40 for ninety minutes it is the cheapest way to find out whether blending is for you. You work with natural essential oils and leave with a 10ml oil-based perfume, in the Northern Quarter - which is where you would want to spend the rest of the afternoon anyway.

The business is real and checkable rather than a pop-up: Cedar Home Fragrance Ltd is registered at Companies House (13220987), founded in 2018 by Lizzy as a side project alongside teaching, and grown into a home-fragrance brand stocked in over thirty independent shops with press in Vogue, Elle and the Guardian.

Be straight about what it is. Cedar's core business is candles and home fragrance; the perfume workshop is a real, bookable, properly-run part of the offer, but you are being taught by a home-fragrance maker rather than a fine-fragrance perfumer. For £40 and ninety minutes that is an entirely fair trade, and the naturals-and-oils format is coherent.

The geography is the strongest argument for booking it. Perfume workshops in Britain cluster almost entirely in London, with a thin scatter through Bath, Scotland and Wales. If you are in Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool or Sheffield, this is the nearest thing to a standing, dependable perfume-making session you will find, and it is good enough that you should not think of it as a compromise.