Free Guided Tour at Scentopia Singapore

*Need to be pre-booked via our website. Not available till Sept 2023

Learn and Discover

Sentosa is covered with secondary rainforest and houses the most amazing flora, much of which is native. It is also the place where Singapore's only dinosaur footprint was discovered.

Our perfumery exhibits and tours are designed to appreciate the heritage & history of perfumery in a very Singaporean context, with special focus on Orchids & Sentosa's plants.

Tours - Topics including Botanical exploration & Celebration of Singaporean Floral Heritage

Smell Sentosa's coastal rain forest ingredients & learn about Singapore's floral heritage. We touch upon several topics through out the day. These may change day to day depending on the expert guides. These include few mentioned below:

1- (Most popular) Sentosa's history, floral heritage and fragrant plants - Learn how Sentosa went from a lake to island, to Pulau Blakang Mati, prison of war area and finally became an island resort. we will also explore some heritage plants, both native and alien to Sentosa.

2- (Preferred by Students) - Science of perfumery - Learn how Perfumery is essentially applied chemistry. We will look at extraction of ingredients including expression, distillation, fractional distillation, MSDS, GCMS etc

3- (Preferred by Students) - Nature Walk of Sentosa - Each participant will receive an Augmented reality enabled booklet and our guide will take you out of scentopia. we will see and explore pill box (right opposite Scentopia), Sapphire pavilion and learn about Sook Chin, Angsana tree, Bugis culture and the strange disease that kiled original Sentosa's inhabitants

4- (History lovers) Sir Raffles Collection- He founded modern Singapore 200 years ago. In 1819, Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles signed a treaty with the Sultan of Johor, granting the British East India Company rights to set up a trading post in Singapore

5- (Self Guided using AR tech) Crazy Orchids - Orchids are one of the oldest family of flowering plants. Orchid varieties have been found all over the world. They have been around since before the continents separated! Orchids are very diverse, attractive and economically important plants distributed from tropical to temperate zones. The family Orchidaceae consists of nearly 30,000 wild species and about 100,000 hybrids

6- (Preferred by Students) - Animal and Human sense of smell - Do you know sharks can smell 1 drop of blood in an olympic size pool?

7- (History lovers) History of Perfumery - From 3300 BC to now! Perfumes and their use dates back to the dawn of time, developing alongside civilisations.. The oldest commercial perfumery was discovered on the island of Cyprus. Distillation was developed by Arabs and significant distillation jars have been found in Indus valley. The word perfume as used today, comes from the Latin word, "per fumus," meaning through smoke.

8- (Wellness) Sense of smell and wellbeing - People are essentially visually oriented, and dependent on sight and sound to gather information from the surroundings. Smell, however, is an extraordinary sense

9- (Wellness) Ayurveda and Brihat Samhita oils- Ayurvedic s one of the world's oldest holistic (“whole-body”) healing systems. It was developed more than 3,000 years ago in India.

Brihat-samhita, is one of the fundamental works of ancient Indian astronomy (known as Jyotisha). It has about 4000 Sanskrit verses (slokas) by Varahamihira, who was considered as a great scientific scholar of mathematics, astronomy and astrology. The Brihat-samhita is written as an encyclopedia covering topics ranging from astronomy to divination and various arts such as architecture, agriculture and jewellery. Its chapter 77 focuses on Preparation of Perfumes (gandhayukti). Smell these ancient perfumes.

10- (Wellness) Therapeutic Orchids in Traditional Chinease Medicine - Traditional Chinese medicine not only employs a different classification of diseases (yin and yang, or wood, fire, soil, metal and water) to that employed in Western medicine, but also concentrates more on prevention than on treatment. Chinese Materia Medica dealing largely with prevention that included fish products (25%), shrubs (23%), herbs (19%), bird products (17%), mammal products (10%), reptile products (4%) and minerals (2%).
Utility of orchids for medicine in China can be traced back to 3,000 years ago, the earliest records was in ‘Shijing’ on the Spilanthesis sinensis in 300BC; the book ‘South China Flora’ recorded use of Dendronbium orchids for anti-toxic treatment, Dendronbium was recorded as ‘lucky herb’ . In Tang Dynasty Dendronbium was listed as one of the nine ‘fairy herbs’ meaning herbs from paradise. There are about 300 orchid species are used in traditional Chinese medicines

Cost

Paid guided tour : Cost $25: Includes free gift worth $25 for each participant who buys this tour. You will be spending 20-30 mins with us during this interactive guided tour. Try and be amazed by behind the scene fun perfumery facts and other amazing topics.

Free Self-Guided tour: Small groups and other visitors are welcome to take a self-guided augmented-reality enabled tour!