u/PerfuMate

I've been working on a perfumery project for a while, and one part of it turned into something I thought might actually be useful on its own.

So I decided to make the raw materials catalog completely free and publicly accessible.

It currently contains 1,573 perfumery materials, with a substantial amount of structured information for each material, including:

• 1,148 CAS numbers and 4,300 synonyms / trade names
• A written odor description for every material (about 44,000 words in total)
• 21 olfactive families and 214 sub-families
• An impact rating and volatility band per material
• Estimated GC-MS constituent breakdowns (composition tables) for 588 materials, covering 3,177 constituent rows
• IFRA data: 291 entries from the 51st Amendment, including limits reconstructed and cross-checked entry by entry against the original IFRA source file
• Additional metadata and cross-references, including related materials and common pairings

The goal isn't to make another simple "ingredient list". I wanted something you could actually use when researching a material, comparing materials, looking for alternatives, or trying to understand how a material fits into perfumery.

It's completely free to browse, with no account required and one page per material:

https://perfumate.app/catalog

I'm mainly sharing it because I know how scattered this information can be when you're researching materials. You end up jumping between supplier pages, IFRA documents, CAS searches, GC-MS references and different fragrance databases.

I'd genuinely like feedback from people who actually work with materials:

• Are there fields you'd add?
• Is any information unclear or misleading?
• Which materials are currently hardest to research?
• What would make a material database more useful to you?

And one important note: the IFRA information is provided as a research/reference layer and should not replace checking the current official IFRA standards and relevant supplier documentation before making safety or compliance decisions.

Hopefully it's useful to some of you. If you find an error in a material page, please point it out - I'd much rather fix bad or inaccurate data than leave it there.

About ten years ago I kept catching this smell in the street. Someone would walk past and I'd get hit with it and just stop, completely hooked, and I could never work out what it was. I'd go sniff my way through the shops afterwards and never find it.

One day it happened while I was walking around in Europe with a friend, and he just goes "what's wrong with you, that's Dior Sauvage". Went to a shop that same day, sprayed it on my hand, and it smelled totally different. Bought it anyway. Then the compliments started and I realised no, it really is that, it just smells different in the air than it does on your wrist.

That bugged me enough that I started reading, and reading turned into the thing that pulled me into perfumery in the first place. I really wanted to be able to make something like that myself. And one thing kept coming up in everything I read: Ambroxan.

So I did a couple of workshops, started learning materials, bought a starter kit and just jumped in. First thing I smelled from that kit was the Ambroxan, obviously, and it was exactly what I'd been chasing. I remember actually getting goosebumps off it, neat, on a strip.

So I ordered three more: Cetalox, Ambrofix, Ambrox Super. Same molecule, ambroxide, but each producer's version comes out with its own nuances.

What I've found using them:

- Cetalox is the driest and woodiest, and an absolute nightmare to dilute
- Ambroxan is the classic. Clean, expensive-smelling
- Ambrox Super is the roughest and most aggressive of the four
- Ambrofix leans a bit sweeter and softer, and it's my favourite of the lot

Obviously everyone's nose is different, this is just what I get from them. So I wanted to ask you guys: which is your favourite? What nuances do you get off each one? And when do you reach for which, and what for?

Been reading a lot of beginner formulas here lately and noticing the exact mistake I spent my first year making, so figured it was worth writing up :)

The pattern goes like this. You've got four musks in there. Three dry woody ambers. Two hedione-types. Every one of them got added because it smelled good on its own and seemed like it might help, and each addition felt like progress at the time. But they're all covering the same ground, and the formula doesn't get richer, it just gets louder and blurrier. Everything ends up sanded down into the same middle:

Olfactory mud.

What changed it for me was deciding the job before the material. Not "this smells nice, maybe it works here", but "I need lift in the first twenty minutes" or "the base has no contrast" and then choosing the one material that does that. If you can't say in a sentence what something is doing in there, it usually isn't doing anything except taking up room.
Reaching the smell you were after is the easy half. Sharpening it into something with edges is the hard half, and it mostly comes down to fewer materials each with a clear reason to exist.

So, curious about the other direction: what's a material you took out where the formula got better?