Every bottle of Aroma Sense starts with the same question its founder, Andy Lee, asked himself back in 2021: why does almost nothing sold here actually last through a Singapore day?

Andy wasn't a perfumer by training. He was, by his own account, just someone who liked to smell good and hated that he had to choose between a fragrance he loved and a fragrance that survived his commute. Singapore's heat and humidity are unforgiving on a spritz of eau de toilette — by the time most designer scents made it past lunch, they'd faded to nothing, chased off by the tropical air. He'd tried the department store counters, the diffusers that ran dry within days, the "long-lasting" claims that rarely lasted past 11am. Nothing quite fit the way he lived.

So he started mixing. What began as an evenings-and-weekends hobby — sourcing raw botanical ingredients, testing oil concentrations, comparing how different blends held up over a full day of Singapore weather — slowly turned into something more deliberate. Andy wasn't trying to recreate any one designer house's signature; he was chasing a feeling: the sense of arriving somewhere calm, the way a good scent can turn an ordinary room into a small sanctuary. He treated his own kitchen counter like a lab, filling notebooks with ratios and reactions, asking friends and family to wear test blends through their own long days and report back.

The turning point came when he landed on a formulation at 30% oil concentration — closer to a true parfum than the eau de toilette most people default to — and had it survive a full 12-hour workday intact. That single result became the whole premise of Aroma Sense: fragrance engineered specifically for the tropics, not adapted from a European original and hoped into submission. From there, the project grew arms and legs. A handful of signature blends became 70. Perfume led naturally into home fragrance, then into pure essential oils, and eventually into hair and skin care, as Andy kept asking the same underlying question of every new category: does this actually hold up to how people really live here?

What hasn't changed since that first kitchen-counter batch is the standard Andy holds every formula to — whether it ships to a customer or not. He still says the brand was never built to be the biggest; it was built to be the one he'd actually want standing on his own shelf. Everything else — the 70+ scent library, the official distribution partnerships with Cab's Professional and Biolife, the Singapore warehouse that ships within 24 to 48 hours — followed from getting that one thing right first.

Today, Aroma Sense is run from that same Singapore base — 31 Defu Lane, a few minutes from where Andy first started testing blends — and trusted by customers across the island for premium aromatherapy, fragrance, hair care, and skincare. The company is bigger now, but the test for every new product is still the one Andy used on himself in 2021: put it on, live your day, see if it's still there when you get home.