How to keep track of perfume formulas

The formula that matters is the one you made six months ago and liked, and the question a record has to answer is what exactly that was. Not the current file, which has been edited since, and not the target weights, which were not quite what went into the beaker. A working record has three parts, and a spreadsheet keeps only one of them.

Versions, not overwrites

Every change to a formula is a new version, and the old one stays. That is the whole discipline. The moment a formula is edited in place, the version that was trialled is gone, and the memory that trial five was better than trial six is attached to nothing. Name versions or number them, but keep them, and keep what changed between them: one line raised, one swapped, the reason if you know it. A diff between two versions is the most useful sentence in perfumery.

Batches, with the real weights

A batch is a version plus what was actually weighed, plus the date and the bottles it came from. Two batches of the same version can smell different because a material came from a different lot or a line was over-poured by a tenth; the record has to hold the real figures or the difference cannot be traced. Maceration dates belong here too, because a batch smelled at one week and at six is two different things.

Notes at the moment, not later

Smelling notes written the same evening are worth ten written the next month. Keep them on the version and on the batch, short, dated, and honest, including the ones that say it was worse. A record of what did not work is what stops the same mistake being made in a year.

The tree, not the folder

Formulas branch. A base becomes two directions, one of them is abandoned, the other splits again, and a year later the surviving formula has a lineage nobody wrote down. A folder of files cannot show that; a tree can, and it makes restoring an old branch a matter of pointing at it rather than reconstructing it from memory.

What the bench does with all this

PerfuMate keeps every save of a formula as a version on a tree: branch it, diff any two, restore one, and every batch is weighed against the version it came from and stays attached to it, with its own notes and maceration dates. Stock and costs are on the shelf beside it, so a batch also knows which bottle each line came from. Open the bench and the first save is already version one.