Your first perfume, step by step

Step 1 · no account needed

Open the bench and walk in as a guest

The first open shows a short welcome: pick a theme you like (there are six, and every chart re-tunes to it), flip through the cards, and on the last one choose Continue as guest. Everything you make as a guest lives in a local database on your own device; signing in later moves it to the cloud and syncs your devices, and nothing is lost either way.

Step 2 · the bench

Meet your bench

The dashboard is the whole app in one look: New formula and Add materials at the top, your shelf on the right, AI Studio in the middle, and the maceration journal and notes below. The rail on the left walks between the bench, the library, stock, the community and More.

Step 3 · materials first

Put your first bottles on the shelf

Tap Add materials, then Add from the catalog. This is the part that surprises people coming from spreadsheets: you do not type materials in. The catalog carries 1,581 materials that arrive already described, with odor prose, families, impact, substantivity and CAS, so adding a bottle is search, tap, done.

Type one word and pick from the results. Every row shows its families, and the pyramid glyph on the right previews where the material sits. The icon beside it adds the material to your shopping list instead.

Step 4 · the confirmation

Adopt it, and it is yours

One tap on the adopt icon and the material lands on your shelf, with everything the catalog knows riding along. The row flips to On shelf and the snackbar offers to open it. Add four or five materials this way: a citrus for the top, a floral for the heart, a musk or a wood for the base is a classic first shelf.

Step 5 · the beaker

Create your first formula

Back on the bench, tap Create your first formula. Name it anything (you can rename it forever), keep Perfume selected, and tap Create & start composing. The editor opens on an empty beaker with one gold button.

Step 6 · the picker

Add ingredients from your own shelf

Add first ingredient opens the picker on your shelf. Tap the materials you want in this formula and commit with Select materials. The picker can also reach the whole catalog and even your other formulas (an accord you made can be a line here, and it stays live).

Step 7 · grams in

Weigh the lines

Each new line asks for its amount in a small wizard, one line at a time. Type the grams and press Enter. If the bottle you own is a dilution rather than neat, say so on the line and every calculation corrects for it automatically: a 10% bottle counts a tenth of its grams as aromatic.

Step 8 · the app answers back

Watch the bench think

The moment amounts land, the header comes alive: the total, the split between pyramid bands, and the hints. Give it a top-heavy sketch and it says "No heart yet, a floral or spice would bridge it"; leave the base thin and it says so too. The IFRA chip by the title checks legal limits live while you compose: neat bergamot far over its phototoxicity ceiling turns the chip red before you have made anything you would regret.

These hints are the same arithmetic a paying user gets. Every tool on this page is in the free tier, and so is an unlimited shelf.

Step 9 · the scent profile

Read what you made, before you make it

The Profile toggle opens the scent profile beside the formula: every family with its own weight (here Floral 55.6 against Citrus 44.4), a wear estimate with its confidence said out loud, and the drydown timeline: a 0-24 hour slider drawn in impact rather than quantity, so notes genuinely fade the way they will on skin. Tap a family and it breaks open into its sub-notes: which flowers, which woods.

The Scent Equalizer lives here too: say "more floral at hour eight" with sliders, and it answers in concrete gram moves from bottles you actually own. How the equalizer works.

Step 10 · the one worth finding

Switch it from Amount to Impact

This is the toggle most people never press, and it is the whole argument of the app. Amount is what you weighed. Impact is what a nose actually gets: the same two lines, re-weighted by how hard each material pushes and how fast it leaves. Watch the order flip - by amount this sketch reads Floral 55.6 over Citrus 44.4, and by impact it reads Citrus 62.7 over Floral 37.3. Nothing was edited. The bergamot is simply louder in the air than its share of the bottle suggests, which is exactly the thing a spreadsheet cannot tell you.

No account, no payment, no catch: this is open the moment the bench is, and so is the clock it brings with it.

Step 11 · the clock

Then drag the drydown across the day

Switching to Impact brings a strip along the bottom of the panel: the drydown, a 0 to 24 hour slider that says shares of what is still on skin, not of the weighed amounts. Drag it and the families move as the perfume wears: the citrus at the top of this sketch thins out within the hour, the hedione holds the middle, and whatever you put underneath is what is left at the end of the day. It is drawn absolute rather than renormalised, so a note that fades really does shrink instead of being propped back up to fill the picture.

This is where the base under 10% warning above earns its keep: drag to hour eight on a formula with no base and watch the whole thing disappear. How the drydown is computed.

Step 12 · nothing is ever lost

Keep the history in the tree

The tree button in the header opens the formula's history drawn as a tree: every saved version is a node carrying its family colours, a fork is a branch, and any node can be viewed, compared, restored, branched again, or logged as the batch you made. Save a snapshot before every experiment and experiment fearlessly: work continues in a straight line, and a wild idea forks without touching the original.