A perfume ingredient database that arrives described

Some formulation tools arrive empty by design, a spreadsheet starts blank, and even the tools that ship a large library hand you entries to fill rather than described profiles. PerfuMate ships the other way round: a catalog of 1,581 perfumery materials already described and classified, and the whole of it is free to browse without an account.

What does every material row carry?

An odour description in words, olfactive families in dominance order, a potency rating, a pyramid band, substantivity in hours, a typical working dilution, a CAS number where one exists, supplier synonyms, and on hundreds of naturals an estimated constituent table.

• An odor description in words, on every material without exception, drawing on more than a hundred distinct descriptive facets across the catalog.
• Olfactive families in dominance order. The catalog uses 21 olfactive families and over two hundred family and sub-category pairs, and most materials sit in more than one family at once, in a definite order. That is the point: a material is not a label, it is a mixture of characters in a definite order.
• A potency rating out of 10 on every material, and an impact figure out of 10 on its page.
• A top, heart or base band on the odorants. Solvents and carriers stand outside the pyramid, filed in buckets that carry no smell and take no share of a formula's character.
• Substantivity, in hours on a blotter. Hundreds of materials carry a sourced figure, and the app labels every one of them an estimate on the face of the number, because a blotter is not an exact science. Where no figure exists it estimates from family and band instead.
• A typical working dilution on hundreds of materials, and whether the material is natural or synthetic.
• A CAS number where one exists. The rows without one are mostly compounded bases, which have no single CAS to give.
• 4,308 supplier and trade synonyms, attached to materials rather than counted as materials, so an import recognises a material under the name your supplier printed rather than the one we chose.
• Estimated constituent tables on hundreds of naturals and bases: roughly what an essential oil is made of, which is how a limit written against a single molecule can be enforced on the oil that carries it.

Where do the family percentages come from?

The catalog does not store a hand-typed percentage per material. It stores the order a material's families come in, which one leads and which is secondary, and one shared curve turns that order into shares: the primary family takes 6 parts, the second 3, the third 2, the rest 1 each, with a family's share split across its sub-categories. The same curve drives the profile chart, the pyramid, the colour of a material's swatch and the genre title, so all four agree by construction rather than by coincidence.

Are the coverage figures counted or claimed?

Every coverage figure PerfuMate publishes is counted out of the seed file the app ships, at the moment the page is built, rather than typed by hand and left to age. A field that stops being filled shrinks the claim instead of leaving a boast standing. The count is not padded either: the rows are distinct, with zero duplicate names, and the synonyms are attached to materials rather than counted as materials. The long version of that answer, with the numbers, is at is the count padded and how much is known about each material.

What are the limits of this data?

First, every regulatory join, IFRA, GHS and allergens alike, is by CAS number. A material can supply one through its estimated constituents as well as its own row, so it is unassessed only when it has neither, and that comes back as "nothing known" rather than "nothing applies", and the app does not dress that up as a clean bill. Second, there is no physical chemistry on a catalog row: no molecular weight, no vapour pressure, no logP, no boiling point. The behaviour in time comes from sourced blotter figures and family, not from physical constants. Both are open work rather than solved problems.

Can I read the catalog without an account?

The catalog needs no account and no purchase to read. Start at the index, grouped by olfactive family, or go straight to a material: Iso E Super, Hedione, bergamot essential oil with its constituent table, or oakmoss absolute. Each page carries the whole row described above, so you do not have to take any of this on trust.

When you want to compose with the materials rather than read about them, the same catalog is loaded on the bench, free, with no account needed to start. Open the bench.