Personalised beauty used to mean your initials on a lipstick case. Lovely, technically personal, hardly bespoke.

You can now have a lipstick mixed to a shade that doesn’t exist yet, build a fragrance around notes you didn’t know you liked, and get prescription skincare without setting foot in a dermatologist’s office.

I’ve tried several versions of this over the past few years. Some were pure indulgence. One changed how I get hold of certain ingredients entirely. All of them made the same thing clear: putting your name on a product and actually making that product for you are very different things.

Code8 bespoke lipstick experience

Best for: creating a lipstick shade that’s actually yours

They make it in front of you, which is as satisfying as it sounds. Forty-five minutes, a glass of champagne, and one of Code8’s Colour Maestros talking you through formula first (creamier or more matte, I went creamy) and then colour. Instead of squinting at a display deciding which shade is close enough, pigments are mixed and tweaked until you’re happy, then melted, poured and turned into an actual bullet.

The surprise was that I didn’t end up with the sort of shade I’d normally buy. Personalisation supposedly gives you the most you version of something you already own, but having someone else in the room pushes you out of your usual parameters. I love the colour precisely because I’d never have picked it off a counter.

Code8 archives the formula, so it can be remade when you finish it. That’s the detail that turns an afternoon out into a product.

You leave with: your lipstick, made on the day, with the formula archived for reordering

The cost: from £85 per person, or £150 for two. Book your experience here.

Where: Covent Garden, Canary Wharf and Mayfair, London

Floris bespoke fragrance customisation

Best for: a truly bespoke fragrance

Two hours in a perfumery that has been on Jermyn Street since 1730, working out what you actually want to smell like. Harder than it sounds.

We started with the history and then narrowed down what I liked and, more usefully, what I didn’t. I wanted fresh and light without sweet or traditionally feminine, but smelling things side by side surfaced preferences I couldn’t have named. Clean citrus, a slightly masculine edge. Iris was an immediate no: on me it smelled like my grandmother’s old lipstick.

Then we started customising the base, which is where choosing a perfume turns into making one. My perfumer Anna added notes that shifted different parts of it. Fig leaf was the revelation, green and sharp, like crushing leaves between your fingers. Woody amber, sandalwood and Java wood went in for depth. The result was luminous but grounded, and it felt like mine. I named it Theia, after my daughter. (the full story of how it came together is here)

The formula goes into the Floris ledgers, so I can reorder it. This isn’t everyday shopping, and part of what you’re paying for is the two hours rather than the 100ml you carry out. I’ve tried plenty of expensive fragrances. This is the one with a memory attached.

You leave with: a 100ml bottle of your fragrance, with the formula kept in the Floris ledgers.

The cost: £750 for the customisation, £200 a bottle to reorder. Book here

Where: 89 Jermyn Street, St James’s, London

Ormonde Jayne scent, strength and style

Best for: the gift version of a signature scent

Over 90 minutes, with champagne and chocolates, you’re guided through Ormonde Jayne’s perfumes, choose the one that suits you, decide how strong you want it (up to extrait), pick a coloured bottle, and have the cap engraved and the box wrapped.

It’s a lovely afternoon and the fragrances are genuinely distinctive. But the scent already exists. What you’re customising is the strength, the bottle and the engraving, which is a nice touch, but a different thing from blending your own.

That isn’t a criticism so much as a useful reference point. At £325 a person it costs more than blending something new elsewhere in London, which tells you that price and depth of personalisation don’t move together.

You leave with: a full size bottle of your chosen perfume at the strength you picked, engraved and gift-wrapped.

Good to know: you can bring friends for £50 each, and they each leave with a 10ml travel spray.

The cost: £325 per person. Book here.

Where: 16 The Royal Arcade, 28 Old Bond Street, Mayfair, London

Experimental Perfume Club

Best for: making your own perfume at a more accessible price point

If Floris is the heirloom version, this is the accessible one. From a lab-boutique on Monmouth Street in Covent Garden, you work with a blending master to combine the house’s Essentials into something of your own, then walk out with a full-size 50ml Eau de Parfum bottled that day and a formula card so you can reorder it.

The method is the honest difference. You’re blending curated bases rather than composing from raw materials, which means a beginner gets a wearable result in under an hour instead of a training course. It’s also a B Corp, if that matters to you.

You leave with: a 50ml Eau de Parfum bottled that day, plus a formula card for reordering

The cost: £145 for the 45-minute Blending Experience, or £195 per person for the hour-long Luxe version in the Perfumer’s Alcove, prosecco included. Book here.

Where: Monmouth Street, Covent Garden, London

Dermatica and Skin + Me

Best for: personalised prescription skincare

I started using Dermatica years ago, when I discovered tretinoin. Unlike the retinols filling beauty shelves, tretinoin is a medicine and needs a prescription here. Dermatica removes the queue: you complete an online consultation, upload photographs, and a clinical team assesses your skin and compounds a formula where it’s appropriate. Skin + Me works much the same way, with the formula delivered in a dispenser that doses a pea-sized amount a day.

My prescription isn’t simply tretinoin. It combines tretinoin, azelaic acid, niacinamide and hydroquinone, chosen together for my skin. These are medicines, though, so the combination and how long you stay on it are the prescriber’s call, not yours. Hydroquinone especially is used in limited courses under supervision, which is exactly why it isn’t something you can add to a basket.

This is where personalisation stops being about exclusivity. Nobody wants a unique tretinoin because their friends can’t buy it. The point is that our skin isn’t identical, yet for years we’ve been expected to choose from fixed formulations and work out the rest ourselves.

Dermatica: £24.99 a month. Start a consultation here.
Skin + Me: £29.99 a month. Start a consultation here.

You leave with: a prescription formula made up for your skin, reviewed by a clinician

Where: Online, delivered UK-wide

With Christmas coming, the lipstick and perfume experiences also make good gifts. You’re giving someone an afternoon, and something they’ll keep long after.