How it works, what it does with your data, and what changed in each release.
Catalog
291
Houses
53
Offline
Yes
Account
None
What it is
You own a shelf of fragrances and wear the same three. Scent Picker looks at the weather, where you're going, and how long you need it to last, then picks from what you actually own.
It's a website, not an app-store app. Add it to your home screen and it behaves like any other app — full screen, its own icon, no address bar. No sign-up, no password, nothing to pay for.
Getting it on your phone
Open the site in your phone's browser — Safari on iPhone, Chrome on Android.
Add it to your home screen. iPhone: Share → Add to Home Screen. Android: menu → Add to Home screen.
Open it from the new icon rather than the browser from now on.
Then build your collection in the Manage tab.
Order matters on iPhoneiPhone treats the home-screen version and Safari as two separate apps that share nothing. Build your collection in Safari first and the home-screen version opens empty. Install first, then add your scents.
Using it
Two tabs. Pick gets you a recommendation. Manage is your collection.
Weather
Cold, cool, mild, warm, hot, or humid — or tap Use my location, or type a US ZIP.
Time outside
Half an hour to twelve-plus hours.
Occasion
Daily errands, work, outdoor or active, a date, an evening out, or an event.
Needs to last
One to fourteen hours. This drives the spray advice.
You get one best match with the reasons it won, any warnings — "heavy scent can turn cloying in heat" — and three runners-up, each with its own notes, strength, longevity and spray guidance.
Notes to avoid
A collapsible Notes to avoid section sits at the top of the Pick tab. Choose a note — musk, oud, powdery, whatever someone can't stand — and scents built on it are left out of the results entirely, rather than shuffled down where you'd still have to spot them.
By default only a main note excludes a scent. A note sitting in the base of a fragrance is not what it smells of — plenty of fresh scents carry a trace of musk, plenty of woody ones a trace of smoke — so hiding every one of them would throw away most of a collection over something nobody would notice. Greenley keeps its place; Another 13, which really is a musk fragrance, does not. The same rule applies to all 43 notes.
Tick also hide scents where it's only a background note if you want nothing at all. The quick list covers the notes people most often object to, and show all notes, by family groups the rest — fresh and green, floral and powdery, sweet and gourmand, woods, deep and smoky — so yours is easy to find.
The results say how many were hidden and will list them with the reason. Save a set as a named list — "Date night" — and recall it in a tap; the list remembers the strict setting too.
The weather shortcut
A Today / Tomorrow toggle appears once a lookup succeeds, so you can pick tonight for tomorrow morning. Tomorrow uses the forecast high; humidity is not in the daily forecast, so today's figure stands in and the app says so.
Tap Use my location and it reads current temperature, humidity and wind for wherever you are. High humidity counts against heavy scents; a stiff breeze means a fragrance disperses faster outdoors. Works anywhere in the world. Decline the prompt and the US ZIP box is still there.
Keeping track of what you wore
Tap I wore this today under a recommendation, or the clock button beside any scent in your collection — that second one matters, because what you actually reached for is often not what the app suggested.
Anything worn recently shows a worn 3 days ago badge, and gets a small nudge down the ranking so you rotate rather than reaching for the same three. The nudge is deliberately gentle: it fades over five days and never outweighs weather fit, so if it is cold and you own one winter scent, that scent still wins on the third day running.
Nothing is logged automatically. Asking the app what to wear is a question, not a wearing, so recording it for you would fill the log with scents you only considered. Your history travels with your collection when you back it up.
How it decides
Every fragrance is scored against your four answers; highest total wins.
Weather fit
The biggest single factor. A cold-weather fragrance loses heavily on a hot day.
Staying power
Measured against how long you need it. Something that fades early still appears, flagged to plan a re-apply.
Occasion
Whether the scent genuinely suits what you're doing.
Strength
Heavy scents are penalised in heat and humidity; light ones rewarded. Evenings and events reward more presence.
Where the numbers come from
Nobody rated each fragrance out of five by hand. Every entry lists what it actually smells like — citrus, tobacco, oud, vanilla — from a fixed vocabulary of 43 descriptors, and the app works out the rest. Citrus and sea notes lean hot-weather, light, short-lived; tobacco, oud and amber lean cold-weather, heavy, long. Concentration adjusts it: an EDT is lighter and shorter than the same scent as an EDP.
Checked against realityResults were compared with sixteen fragrances whose reputations are well established, and matched all sixteen. Light Blue comes out light and summery; Tobacco Vanille heavy and wintry at around eleven hours; Aventus strong but versatile.
The catalog
291 fragrances from 59 houses — Dior, Chanel, Creed, Tom Ford, Parfums de Marly, Kayali, Diptyque, Kilian, Xerjoff, Louis Vuitton and more, alongside high-street staples. Search by name, brand, or note: type vanilla and you get everything with vanilla in it.
Anything not in the list can still be added by hand, and it's scored on the same footing as everything else.
Worth knowingThe catalog is a hand-built list, not an official fragrance database. There's no fragrance service the app is allowed to look things up from, so it carries its own — which is why search is instant and works with no signal. Note listings are abbreviated and the strength and longevity figures are educated estimates. Spot-check anything you care about; every value stays editable.
Finding your next one
Under Because you own… in the Manage tab, the app suggests catalog scents that share their character with what you already have — shares fruity and smoky with Aventus. Tap the plus to add one.
It compares main notes rather than every note, so two scents built on the same thing rank far above two that both carry a trace of musk. Different concentrations of something you already own are left out: nobody discovers a fragrance they already have in another bottle. If you log what you wear, the scents you actually reach for count for more than the ones merely sitting on the shelf.
Your collection
New visitors start empty and build their own. Load starter collection drops in a ready-made set of sixteen well-known scents without duplicating anything you have. Clear collection empties it, with a confirmation first.
Your collection saves to the device you're using and stays there between visits — including when the app is updated.
Backing up and moving between devices
Back up / move shows your whole collection as a block of text with a Copy button. Paste it somewhere safe. Restore from backup takes that text back: paste it in and choose add to my collection, which skips anything you already have, or replace everything, which confirms first.
There are deliberately no files involved. Downloading something, hunting for it in a file manager and uploading it again is a desktop habit; copying text works the same way on every device.
Still one collection per deviceNothing syncs automatically — moving a collection is something you do deliberately.
Privacy
Almost nothing leaves your phone. Your collection isn't sent anywhere, isn't stored on a server, and can't be seen by anyone else — including whoever runs the site.
Only the weather lookup sends anything out, and only when you ask. Use my location sends your coordinates to a weather service; typing a ZIP sends the ZIP. Nothing else goes with either, and neither is kept. The app deliberately does not look up a place name for your coordinates — a city label isn't worth a second company seeing where you are, so it just says "Your location".
No accounts, no tracking, no analytics, no advertising.
Working without a signal
The app keeps a copy of itself on your phone, so it opens and works with no connection. Your collection, the search, and the recommendations are all local. The one exception is the weather lookup — and it will never show a stale saved reading, so offline it asks you to pick the weather by hand.
Version history
The version is printed at the bottom of the app. The first number changes only for a major reworking; the second counts ordinary releases.
v1.9
A calendar of what you wore
A History tab. A month at a glance, with the days you wore something marked. Tap a day to see what it was.
Fill in days you forgot. Tap any past day and add what you wore. It counts the same as logging on the day, including for the nudge that pushes recently worn scents down.
Logged the wrong thing? Remove it. Previously a mis-tap was permanent.
Most worn — what you actually reach for, counted in days.
Not worn in a month — what is sitting untouched, with anything never worn at the top.
"I wore this today" is now on every scent, not just the day's first suggestion. Before this, logging what you wore was only easy when you agreed with the app.
v1.8
Where everything placed
See the full ranking. A new section under your result lists every scent you own, in order, not just the top four.
Tap any scent for the arithmetic. Where its score came from, line by line — weather fit, how long it lasts, occasion, strength, and any nudge for having worn it recently.
Scents left out show the place they would have taken. "Would have been first, left out because vanilla is a main note" — so your avoid list is a trade-off you can see rather than a scent quietly disappearing.
Two things that used to move your results silently now say so: missing the occasion you picked, and small nudges for a scent worn in the last few days.
v1.7
A much bigger catalog
291 fragrances, up from 213. Six new houses — Billie Eilish, Kayali, Miu Miu, Lush, Marc Jacobs and Valentino — plus a lot more from Diptyque, Kilian, Xerjoff, Louis Vuitton, Burberry, Ralph Lauren and the Parfums de Marly Exclusif line.
Women's fragrances are properly represented now. The catalog had grown lopsided toward men's scents; this fills in the flagships that were missing, including Chanel Chance and Gabrielle, Mon Paris, Paradoxe, Daisy, Yara and Born in Roma.
Everything new is searchable and works with notes to avoid and the suggestions, same as the rest.
v1.6
Older collections repaired
Notes to avoid now works on collections built before it existed. A collection saved before v1.3 was stored without the smell descriptions the avoid list reads, so avoiding vanilla quietly let a vanilla scent through. Those descriptions are now filled back in from the catalog the first time you open the app.
Because you own… works on those collections too — it reads the same descriptions, and had been showing nothing at all for anyone who had been using the app since the early days.
A hand-typed scent is checked against its own note list when you did not pick any notes for it, so avoiding vanilla catches a scent with vanilla written on it.
v1.5
Suggestions, and tomorrow
Because you own… suggests catalog scents sharing the character of what you already have, and says which one prompted it.
Today / Tomorrow. Check tonight what tomorrow calls for.
Suggestions skip anything you own and any other concentration of it.
v1.4
What you wore
Log what you wear from a recommendation or from any scent in your collection.
Recently worn scents are nudged down so you rotate — gently, and never over weather fit.
Badges show what you reached for and when.
History is carried in backups, and kept separate from your collection so losing one never costs the other.
v1.3
Notes to avoid
Leave out notes you don't want. Pick them on the Pick tab and those scents are removed from the results, not just ranked lower.
Main notes by default. A scent is only excluded when the note is part of its character, not when it's a trace in the base — with an option to be stricter.
Saved lists. Name a set of notes and recall it in a tap.
Scents you add by hand can now record what they smell like, so the filter can see them too — and the starter collection carries that information for the first time.
v1.2
Backups, and weather anywhere
Back up and move your collection. Copy it as text and paste it back on another device. Until now a collection lived on one device with no way out and no backup.
Use my location. Weather now works anywhere in the world instead of US ZIP codes only, and reaches one fewer outside service than the ZIP route does.
Restoring checks every entry on the way in, skips duplicates, and says exactly what it did.
v1.1
Rename, readability, and a safety net
Renamed to Scent Picker to match the domain, leaving existing collections untouched.
The header no longer hides under the iPhone clock. The title and light/dark toggle sat beneath the time and battery, making the toggle hard to tap.
A checker for the fragrance list. The app used to silently ignore any smell-description word it didn't recognise, so one typo could turn a heavy winter fragrance into an average all-rounder with no warning.
One bad entry can no longer break the whole app. A malformed line used to stop the entire app loading for everyone.
v1.0
Catalog, saved collections, offline
The AI stylist was removed, along with the separate program it needed running on a computer.
The searchable catalog arrived — 213 fragrances across 53 houses, replacing a fixed list.
Collections now save. Previously everything vanished on refresh, and every visitor saw the same borrowed collection.
Fairer scoring. Hand-typed scents had been marked suitable for every occasion, quietly giving them free points on every search.
Fuller results, offline support, and app-icon fixes for iPhone and Android.
Known limits
Collections don't sync automatically. You can move one between devices with the backup tools, but it's a deliberate step.
The catalog is compiled by hand. Well-known releases are reliable; obscure ones aren't in it at all. Strength and longevity are estimates, not measurements.
The ZIP fallback is US-only. Location works worldwide; only the typed-ZIP route is limited to US postcodes.
Spray guidance is a starting point, based on the fragrance and the length of your day — not on your skin, which holds scent differently from anyone else's.
"Main note" is judged by how a scent is described, not by measurement — the notes are listed roughly in order of prominence, and the first half count as its character.