Perfumery is art. I tried to treat it like engineering.
I got into perfumery a while back. My thinking was: how hard can it be? I just mix things that smell good, so there's no way the result smells bad. Couldn't have been more wrong.
I ordered around 100 raw materials and figured that was it. A couple of weeks of trial and error and I'd have something at the level of my favorite, d'Ombre Leather.
I got overwhelmed fast. The materials smelled nothing like the descriptions on the supplier sites. Musks all kind of smell the same. Does hedione even have a smell? 2-methyl pyrazine smells straight-up awful.
So, like every newbie, I turned to ChatGPT. The AI must know how to make a decent perfume, right? Wrong again. Overdose after overdose, getting more and more desperate. I'd spent 600 euros on materials I had no clue how to use.
Being an engineer, I figured there had to be a more analytical way to crack this. Turns out there's real physical stuff sitting under the art: vapor pressure, logP, typical usage ranges, odor impact, how much of a material actually survives dilution versus how much you dosed it at. Once I started thinking about a formula as perceived weight instead of raw percentages on a page, "why does this smell off?" stopped being a mystery and became something I could check before I ever smelled it.
That rabbit hole got deep enough that I ended up building a little tool for myself to track all of it: material data, dilution math, substitutions, that kind of thing. It's turned into a proper side project (AccordLab, if anyone's curious)
Still very much learning, but treating it like a system instead of a mood has made the biggest difference by far.
So how did other self-taught people here get past this stage? Trial and error until it clicked, or did anyone else end up building their own way of tracking all this?