PerfuMate › Report
This is what one classified perfumery catalog contains, counted rather than described. Every figure in the tables below is computed from the material file PerfuMate ships, at the moment this page is built, so none of them was typed by anybody.
Read this as a claim about this catalog, not about perfumery. These 1,581 materials were chosen to be the ones a formulation tool needs to carry. Where a number below would be interesting as a general fact about perfumery, it is still only a fact about these rows. Nothing here is a survey.
A catalog is only as good as its thinnest column. These are counted at build time, so a field that stops being filled shows up here as a smaller number rather than as nothing.
| Field | Materials | Share | |
|---|---|---|---|
| A written odour description | 1,581 | 100% | |
| An olfactive family, not a filing bucket | 1,529 | 97% | |
| A sub-family | 1,580 | 99.9% | |
| A volatility band: top, heart or base | 1,532 | 97% | |
| An odour strength, 1 to 10 | 1,581 | 100% | |
| A CAS number | 1,153 | 73% | |
| Supplier or trade synonyms | 1,436 | 91% | |
| An estimated constituent table | 588 | 37% | |
| Facet tags | 1,581 | 100% |
The CAS gap is worth stating plainly, and worth counting rather than characterising: 428 rows carry no CAS number, of which 108 are naturals and 320 are synthetics. The naturals are the expected part, because one molecule does not describe an essential oil. The synthetics are the larger group, and 243 of them carry a supplier or trade synonym in this catalog.
This matters beyond tidiness, though less than it first looks. IFRA limits, GHS hazard data and the EU allergen list all join to a material by CAS, and a row's own CAS is not the only one it offers: 301 of those 428 rows carry an estimated constituent table, and all three checks join through the constituents as well. That leaves 127 rows, 8% of the catalog, with no CAS of their own and no breakdown to stand in for one. Those are the rows where an empty answer would look exactly like a clean one. The app's own under-assessed test is wider still at 156 rows, because a natural with a CAS but no breakdown hides what is inside it behind the oil's own number. PerfuMate marks all of them unknown rather than safe.
423 of 1,581 rows are naturals, 27%, and the split by family is nowhere near uniform.
Median strength is a filing, not a measurement. It is a perfumer's judgement of how much a material makes itself heard at the same dose, recorded on one 1 to 10 scale across all 1,581 rows. That makes the numbers comparable to each other and to nothing else. It appears in this table and the next one.
| Family | Materials | Natural | Share natural | Median strength |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Floral | 305 | 79 | 26% | 6 |
| Woody | 161 | 58 | 36% | 6 |
| Green | 148 | 20 | 14% | 6 |
| Fruity | 145 | 6 | 4% | 6 |
| Gourmand | 123 | 18 | 15% | 7 |
| Herbal | 114 | 58 | 51% | 6 |
| Citrus | 105 | 53 | 50% | 6 |
| Spicy | 83 | 45 | 54% | 6 |
| Musk | 63 | 2 | 3% | 5 |
| Resinous | 56 | 31 | 55% | 5 |
| Aldehydic | 46 | 1 | 2% | 8 |
| Amber | 34 | 4 | 12% | 7 |
| Earthy | 30 | 14 | 47% | 7 |
| Animalic | 30 | 6 | 20% | 8 |
| Aquatic | 22 | 1 | 5% | 6.5 |
| Sweet | 18 | 1 | 6% | 6 |
| Smoky | 15 | 6 | 40% | 8 |
| Leather | 11 | 1 | 9% | 8 |
| Ambergris | 9 | 1 | 11% | 7 |
| Powdery | 6 | 0 | 0% | 5 |
| Tropical | 5 | 0 | 0% | 7 |
Two more buckets exist and are left out of this table on purpose: 45 solvents and 7 rows filed only as other. 34 of them carry no olfactive family at all. The other 18 are filed in a bucket and still carry real families, and PerfuMate weights those normally: what its family weighting skips is the two bucket names, not the rows filed under them.
1,532 of the 1,581 materials are filed top, heart or base. Here is what those bands look like when you count them, and the answer to the heading is: not on loudness. The median odour strength is the same in all three.
| Band | Materials | Share of catalog | Median strength | Share natural |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Top | 394 | 25% | 6 | 32% |
| Heart | 689 | 44% | 6 | 24% |
| Base | 449 | 28% | 6 | 26% |
49 rows sit outside the pyramid entirely. 45 of them are the solvents, every one: a diluent has no place in a scent pyramid, and giving it one would put weight where there is no smell. The other 4 are additives rather than odorants.
This is the same filing as the two tables above, spread out: it is the number PerfuMate uses to work out impact rather than weight.
| Strength | Materials | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 46 | |
| 2 | 22 | |
| 3 | 67 | |
| 4 | 143 | |
| 5 | 298 | |
| 6 | 412 | |
| 7 | 284 | |
| 8 | 210 | |
| 9 | 80 | |
| 10 | 19 |
99 materials sit at 9 or 10, 6% of the catalog. PerfuMate's AI does not dose the loudest bands like the rest: strengths 8, 9 and 10 each carry their own ceiling on how much of a concentrate they may be, which is a bracket per band rather than a figure per material. The 1,272 materials below strength 8 have none.
1,465 of 1,581, 93%, carry more than one olfactive family. That is the case against filing a material under a single heading, and it is why a scent profile here splits a material's character by dominance rather than assigning it whole to one family.
The most common sub-categories beneath those families. A material filed under the same sub-category through two different families is counted once here, so these are materials rather than mentions:
| Sub-category | Materials | |
|---|---|---|
| Leafy | 333 | |
| Dry | 318 | |
| Balsamic | 209 | |
| Aromatic | 206 | |
| Warm | 204 | |
| Sugary | 203 | |
| Rose | 178 | |
| Green | 146 | |
| Waxy | 132 | |
| Jammy | 126 | |
| Honey | 117 | |
| Zesty | 115 | |
| Herbal | 107 | |
| Honeyed | 106 | |
| White | 104 |
The catalog is assembled and maintained by one perfumer, from supplier documentation, published literature and bench work, and it is the same file the app ships rather than a marketing extract. Odour strength and the volatility band are filings, not measurements: a perfumer's judgement, applied consistently across all 1,581 rows, which is what makes them comparable to each other and not to anybody else's scale. Constituent tables are estimates and say so on every page that shows one. Where a material carries no CAS number, nothing has been invented to fill the column.
Every material behind these numbers has its own page: start at the catalog, or a family such as floral or woody.