Materials guide
Building a formula from individual materials
The Ingredient Builder lets you compose from the ground up: pick materials from the library or define your own, set how much of the oil blend each one should be, and let Scentena auto-complete and rebalance the rest while screening against the stored reference data available to it.
Naturals versus synthetics
Perfumery draws on two broad families of materials. Naturals — essential oils, absolutes, and resinoids — are complex, often hundreds of molecules in one ingredient, which gives richness but also batch-to-batch variation and tighter IFRA limits. Synthetics — single aroma chemicals and captives — are consistent, frequently more powerful, and unlock notes that nature cannot supply cleanly, such as crisp marine, clean musk, or transparent woods.
Most modern fragrances blend both: naturals for depth and story, synthetics for clarity, strength, and longevity. The builder lets you filter the library by material type so you can balance the two deliberately.
Percent of concentrate, not the bottle
When you add a material you set its percentage of the concentrate — the oil blend — not the finished perfume. This is the standard way perfumers write a formula, because it keeps the recipe independent of how strong you later choose to dilute it.
A material at 5% of concentrate in a 20% EDP ends up at about 1% of the finished bottle. Scentena does this math for you and shows both the concentrate percentage and the finished percentage so you can sanity-check against IFRA limits, which are always expressed as a share of the finished product.
Dosing and material strength
Aroma materials vary enormously in power. A trace of a strong synthetic can dominate a blend, while a soft natural may need several percent to register. When you create a custom material you describe its strength and volatility so the auto-complete can place it sensibly in the pyramid and avoid overdosing.
If a material is new to you, start low. It is far easier to add more on the next iteration than to rescue a blend that one loud ingredient has taken over.
- Powerful synthetics (e.g. certain musks, aldehydes): often well under 1%.
- Typical heart florals and woods: a few percent of concentrate.
- Soft naturals and diluents: can run into double digits.
Accords as building blocks
An accord is a small, pre-balanced blend of materials that reads as a single impression — an "amber" accord, a "green tea" accord, a "clean laundry" musk. Composing with accords instead of dozens of loose materials keeps a formula manageable and reproducible.
Use the custom-material tab to capture an accord you have dialed in, give it a name, and treat it like any other ingredient in future formulas.
Frequently asked questions
- What does auto-complete actually do?
- It starts from your brief, keeps the materials you queued, and proposes a balanced formula around them — adding complementary top, heart, and base notes, normalizing the percentages, and re-checking the stored reference limits available to the application.
- Why did my percentages change after generating?
- The concentrate must total 100%, so when materials are merged Scentena rescales everything proportionally and may trim a material that exceeds an available stored limit. The relative balance is preserved where possible, but the result still requires material-specific review.
- Can I add a material that is not in the library?
- Yes. Use the "Create custom" tab to define its note tier, scent family, strength, volatility, and an optional reference limit. User-entered limits are not independently verified; check the exact supplier and official documents before relying on them.
- How do I make my blend last longer?
- Emphasize base notes and fixatives, raise the overall oil concentration, and lean on lower-volatility woods, ambers, and musks. The longevity boost applies these adjustments automatically.