PerfuMate › Start here

Your first perfume, step by step

This page walks the whole path in real screenshots of the real app, taken on 2026-08-27. Nothing here is a mock-up. The app has changed since (a new default theme, and a dock where the side rail was), so some screens will look different on yours. You need no account, no card and no experience. If you have ever wanted to make perfume and did not know where the first step is, it is on this page.

One formula is built here from nothing and followed all the way through: four materials, sixty grams, a scent profile, an IFRA check that fails and is fixed, and a batch weighed on a scale. It is called Amber Dusk no. 1, and you will see the same numbers move across every picture below.

PerfuMate is free to start: the free tier does not expire, and with a free account its shelf is uncapped. Paid plans raise the limits and add a few extras, by the month or bought once. Open PerfuMate in another tab and do the steps as you read.

Amber Dusk no. 14 ingredients · v1

Material	Dilution	Amount	Relative
Bergamot Essential Oil10%	10%	14.000g	14.583%
Hedionepure	pure	4.000g	41.667%
Iso E Super10%	10%	30.000g	31.250%
Ambroxan10%	10%	12.000g	12.500%
Total		60.000g	100.000%

Top: 15%
Heart: 42%
Base: 44%

Solvent balance, DPG50.400g

Step 1 · no account needed

Open PerfuMate 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 skip straight through if you would rather just start. 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.

The welcome deck on a first open, with Skip in the corner. No account is asked for and none is needed.

Step 2 · the dashboard

Meet your dashboard

The dashboard is the whole app in one look: New formula, Add materials and Export across the top, your shelf on the right, AI Studio in the middle, and maceration, notes and the IFRA compliance card below. On a computer, the dock moves between Dashboard, Formulas, Materials, Community, Settings and AI Studio. On a phone, the bar at the bottom holds Materials, Formulas, Dashboard, Community and More.

A fresh guest dashboard: an empty shelf, AI Studio, the maceration journal and the IFRA card waiting for something to check.

Step 3 · three ways in

Put your first bottles on the shelf

Tap Add materials and the app asks how you would like to do it: import a whole shelf from a file if you are arriving from a spreadsheet, add from the catalog, or write your own material by hand.

The importer reads CSV, JSON and PDF, takes columns by name rather than by position, and matches what it finds against the catalog so a bottle you import arrives already described.

Three ways onto the shelf: import a file, add from the catalog, or create a material of your own.

Step 4 · the catalog

Everything already described

This is the part that surprises people coming from spreadsheets: you do not type materials in. The catalog carries 2,211 materials that arrive with odor prose, families, impact, substantivity, strip life and CAS, so adding a bottle is search, tap, done.

The built-in catalog, browsable by family, with every material carrying its own description.

Step 5 · search and add

One tap and it is yours

Type one word and pick from the results. Every row shows its families and a pyramid glyph previewing where the material sits, and the button on the right adds it to your shelf with everything the catalog knows riding along. The trolley beside it puts the material on your shopping list instead, for the ones you have not bought yet.

Four or five is a good first shelf: a citrus for the top, a floral for the heart, a wood and a musk underneath. This guide uses Bergamot Essential Oil, Hedione, Iso E Super and Ambroxan.

Searching the catalog for bergamot: described results, each with an add button and a pyramid preview.

Step 6 · your shelf

The shelf is yours to keep

Materials you add land on your shelf and stay there. With a free account the shelf is uncapped: put a hundred bottles on it if you own a hundred bottles. As a guest it holds 25. Everything downstream, the picker, the substitutes, the AI, works from this list rather than from a catalog you do not own.

Four materials added to the shelf, each with its CAS and family.

Step 7 · the beaker

Create your first formula

Back on the dashboard, tap New formula. Name it anything (you can rename it any time), keep Perfume selected rather than Accord, and tap Create & start composing. The same card carries import a formula instead, which is the other half of the import story: a whole formula out of a file rather than a whole shelf.

The new formula card: a name, the Perfume or Accord choice, and the import option beside it.

Step 8 · an empty beaker

The editor opens on nothing at all

One gold button, and a header that is already counting. This is the screen you will spend your time in, and everything else in the app hangs off its header: the tree, the snapshot, the batch, the share and the cost.

The formula editor before anything is in it, with Add first ingredient waiting.

Step 9 · the picker

Add ingredients from your own shelf

Add first ingredient opens the picker on your shelf. Tap the materials you want and commit with Select materials. The picker can also reach the whole catalog and even your other formulas, so an accord you built can be a line inside a perfume and it stays live: change the accord and every formula using it moves.

The picker on the Shelf scope with four materials chosen, and the Catalog and My formulas tabs behind it.

Step 10 · the lines

They sort themselves into the pyramid

The lines arrive already grouped into Top, Heart and Base, because the catalog knows where each material sits. Nothing is weighed yet, so the header says so plainly rather than pretending to a total.

Four lines in, sorted into Top, Heart and Base, with the header asking for amounts.

Step 11 · grams in

Weigh the lines

Each new line asks for its amount, one 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: the 10% chips here mean a tenth of those grams count as aromatic, and the solvent balance at the foot adds up the carrier that came along with them.

Sixty grams total, and the header answers immediately: 15% top, 42% heart, 44% base.

Amber Dusk no. 1 weighed: 60.000g total, the pyramid split live in the header, and 50.400g of DPG carried in by the dilutions.

Step 12 · the header thinks

Watch the formula answer back

The moment amounts land the header comes alive, and the IFRA chip beside the title turns red: bergamot expressed is over its ceiling, and the app said so before you weighed anything you would regret. The chip is live, not a report you run.

Every tool on this page is free except what Unlimited adds: the evolution tree, bottle labels, the sale-ready pack, and the PDF in color with its extra sections. On Free, each formula exports once and the PDF is the formula table in black and white. PDF export and AI Studio ask for a free account first, and AI Studio uses AI credits. Free and Unlimited, side by side.

The editor with the side panel closed: the whole formula, its totals, and the red IFRA chip by the name.

Step 13 · change your mind

Edit any line, whenever

Tap a line and it opens with everything about it in one place: which bottle and at what dilution, the amount in grams, and the same amount said as absolute % of the whole mix and relative % of the aromatics, all three tied together so changing one moves the others.

Underneath, the part that is really for future you: too strong, too weak, replace, and a note. Write down what you smelled while you can still smell it.

One line open: bottle, grams, both percentages computed live, and the how-is-it-behaving row.

Step 14 · the scent profile

Read what you made, before you make it

The Profile tab opens the scent profile beside the formula rather than over it, so the numbers move while you edit. Every family carries its own weight: this sketch reads Floral 46.5, Woody 22.9, Amber 13.5, Citrus 9.7, and a wear estimate that says its own confidence out loud, Clear, moderate wear, 69% sure. Tap any family and it breaks open into sub-notes: which flowers, which woods.

The scent profile beside the formula, weighted by amount, with the wear estimate and its confidence.

Step 15 · the one worth finding

Switch it from Amount to Impact

This toggle is easy to miss, and it is the whole argument of the app. Amount is what is in the bottle. Impact is what a nose actually gets: the same four lines, re-weighted by how hard each material pushes and how fast it leaves.

Watch the order flip. By amount this formula reads Floral 46.5 ahead of Citrus 9.7. By impact it reads Citrus 48.4 ahead of Floral 33.0. Nothing was edited. Fourteen grams of a 10% bergamot is simply louder in the air than its share of the bottle suggests, and that is exactly the thing a spreadsheet cannot tell you.

The same formula in Impact: citrus first now, and the drydown clock arriving along the foot of the panel.

Step 16 · the clock

Then drag the drydown across the day

Switching to Impact brings a slider along the bottom: the drydown, which says shares of what is still on skin, not of the weighed amounts. Drag it from Fresh to Far drydown and the families move as the perfume wears. The citrus that led the opening goes to 0.000 and what is left is Ambergris 34.8, Woody 26.4, Amber 24.8: the bergamot has gone and the base is the perfume now.

It is drawn absolute rather than renormalized, so a note that fades really does shrink instead of being propped back up to fill the picture.

This is where a thin base shows itself: drag towards the end on a formula with nothing underneath and watch the whole thing disappear. How the drydown is computed.

The same profile at far drydown: citrus at zero, and ambergris, woods and amber holding what is left.

Step 17 · the IFRA check

IFRA, live, while you compose

Tap the red chip and the IFRA panel opens against the 51st Amendment for Category 4, fine fragrance. It reads restricted materials as shares of the finished product, and it counts the molecules inside your naturals: the limonene and linalool listed here were never added as ingredients, they came in with the bergamot.

Bergamot oil expressed: 2.33% now against a 0.4% ceiling, 1.93% over. Geraniol and citral, both from the same bottle, are well inside theirs.

The IFRA panel: the amendment named, the category chosen, and every restricted material with its real numbers.

Step 18 · why, not just what

Open the row and it explains itself

A red number is not much use on its own. Open the row and it says what the ceiling is for: bergamot expressed is capped because it is phototoxic, so the limit is about sun exposure rather than sensitization. It also tells you the way out that is not arithmetic: the cap covers the cold-pressed oil only, and the FCF or distilled cut is a different catalog entry the cap does not touch.

The restricted row opened: why the ceiling exists, which cut it applies to, and a Fix that does the arithmetic.

Step 19 · nothing is lost

Fix it, and keep the old one anyway

Fix does not just edit your formula. It shows you exactly what will change, one line, 14.000g becoming 1.817g, and promises the part that matters: this formula as it stands is kept in the evolution tree, and the change continues as a new version called After IFRA fix. With Unlimited, the tree lets you go back to it at any time.

The confirmation before anything moves: the exact before and after, and where the old version goes.

Step 20 · the history

Every version, drawn as a tree

The tree is part of Unlimited. The tree button in the header opens the formula's history: every saved version is a node carrying its family colors, a fork is a branch, and the panel underneath shows the diff against the parent. Here v1 at 60.000g and v2 at 47.817g, with the one line that changed spelled out.

Any node can be viewed, edited, renamed, branched again, restored, or logged as the batch you actually made. Save a snapshot before every experiment and experiment fearlessly.

The evolution tree: v1, v2 After IFRA fix as the current node, the diff between them, and Save snapshot.

Step 21 · the label

Allergens and the line for the bottle

The same panel scrolls down into the EU allergen declaration under Regulation 2023/1545, every declarable allergen with its share of the finished product and which of your materials it came from, and then the INCI label text itself: carrier, Parfum, then every allergen over the threshold, heaviest first, ready to copy onto the packaging.

It is an automated estimate from indicative values, and the panel says so: a certified safety assessor still signs off anything you sell.

The allergen list with each one traced back to the material it came from, and the finished INCI line underneath.

Step 22 · everything else

One menu, the whole formula

The three dots open what the formula can do: make this batch, maceration, cost breakdown, the scent profile, replace with materials I own, ask AI, and the exports: PDF, CSV, JSON, copy to a spreadsheet, SDS, GHS, a bottle label and a sell pack.

The formula options: make, scent, export and history, all from one place.

Step 23 · sharing

Post it, or take it with you

The share button asks which kind of sharing you mean. Post to the community publishes the formula so other people can read it and clone it onto their own shelf. Export as a file hands it to you as a PDF, CSV or JSON, or straight to the clipboard for a spreadsheet.

Two kinds of sharing: publish it to the community, or export the file.

Step 24 · off the screen

Scale it to any batch

A formula is a recipe until you weigh it. Make this batch asks how much you are making and scales every line to the milligram: half, as written, double, five times, or type the number. Then it asks in what order you want to weigh, and base-to-top is the default, so the heavy things go in first.

Scaling the batch: the size, the multipliers, and the weighing order.

Step 25 · one at a time

Then it walks you through the scale

Make mode is one material per screen, in big numbers you can read from across the table with wet hands: the material, its dilution, the grams, and what the scale should read as a running total or per pour. Poured a little too much? Say so, and the rest of the batch re-scales around it.

Step one of four: Ambroxan at 12.000g, what the scale should read, and what is coming next.

Step 26 · the list

And back out to everything you have made

The formulas list keeps a preview beside it, so you can read a formula without opening it: its concentration, its profile, its wear estimate, the IFRA state, and the materials in order. Every formula you ever save lands here.

The formulas list with the preview column: profile, wear, materials and the IFRA state at a glance.

Step 27 · a real person

Tell the developer what is missing

Every message is read by the developer. Settings › Contact (More on a phone) carries a support address and, next to it, the wishlist: one box that says I wish PerfuMate could... and a reply-to if you want an answer.

The wishlist: one field, an optional reply-to, and a send button. No ticket system, no forum account.

Step 28 · where it lives

The rest of Settings

The same page holds the theme picker, your account, and backup and restore, which writes all your work to a file you keep. Nothing about your work is locked inside the app.

Settings (More on a phone): theme, account, backup and restore, contact, the website and about.

Where to go from here

Make it real: the batch sheet scales your sketch to any size to the milligram, Make mode walks the weighing one material at a time, the batch log starts a maceration timeline with reminders, and the stock ledger deducts what you used. All free. The production chain.

Let the AI in: describe a perfume in plain words and AI Studio composes it from your shelf; open any formula and it refines it into a reviewed V2; open a community formula and rebuild it from bottles you own. How the AI works.

Learn the craft: the mechanics behind everything on this page, each taught and then computed: the drydown, the pyramid, dilution math, IFRA (with every limit, material by material) and accords.

Start a formula, free · no account, and the free tier does not expire.