Data study

The Fragrance Taste Index

What 5,303 fragrances reveal about how perfumery changed.

Zenyra scores every fragrance in its catalogue on five axes — warmth, projection, risk, texture and sweetness — each from 0 to 1. This is what the dataset says when you stop looking at fragrances one at a time.

Every figure below is reproducible against the published catalogue. Where the data is weaker, we say so rather than rounding the claim up.

1. Regulation quietly rewrote the perfumer's palette

The clearest signal in the data is not a trend in taste. It is the disappearance of specific materials.

Oakmoss appeared in nearly one in five fragrances released in the 1990s. Today it appears in one in twenty-five — a fivefold collapse, and the sharpest single movement in the dataset. It is the base of the classic chypre, and its restriction on allergen grounds did not merely change formulas; it removed an entire structural family from mainstream release.

Aldehydes — the material that made Chanel No. 5 possible — now appear in barely 1% of new releases.

2. Perfumery got sweeter, and it did not stop

Mean sweetness rose 50% between the 1970s and the 2020s, and the rise is monotonic — every decade sweeter than the last. Warmth followed, but later and less steeply.

What replaced the restricted materials is visible too. Saffron went from 1.5% of releases in the 1990s to 7.8% in the 2020s. Ambroxan and cashmeran, both absent from the dataset before 2000, now appear in 3.3% and 2.7% of new releases. The palette did not shrink — it substituted.

3. The gender gap is almost entirely about sugar

Fragrances marketed to women are scored 45% sweeter than those marketed to men. On every other axis the two are close enough to be indistinguishable — projection differs by 0.013, warmth by 0.015.

Gendered marketing in perfumery, measured this way, is not a difference of strength or character. It is a difference of sugar.

The unisex row is the more interesting one: it is the warmest of the three, and the boldest. Fragrances released without a gender attached are not middle-of-the-road compromises.

4. The safest fragrances are not the cheapest

Boldness broadly rises with price — luxury fragrances score 58% higher on risk than affordable ones. But the floor is not at the bottom of the market. The most risk-averse fragrances are in the affordable tier, not the budget tier.

Budget fragrances — a band including a great many Middle Eastern ouds and amber compositions — are bolder than anything priced above them until you reach premium. The genuinely safe zone is the high-street mass market, where the commercial cost of alienating a buyer is highest.

5. The most famous fragrances are not the most distinctive

Measuring each fragrance's distance from the statistical centre of the catalogue, in standard deviations across all five axes:

Santal 33 — arguably the most imitated fragrance of the last decade — is statistically more ordinary than three-quarters of the catalogue. So is Baccarat Rouge 540, at 70%.

This is not a criticism. It is close to a definition of what mass appeal means: fragrances become ubiquitous by sitting near the centre of what people already like. The exception is Tobacco Vanille, both enormously popular and a genuine statistical outlier.

At the far edge sit Al Haramain Khulasat Al Oud (6.04) and Testament Sang Noir (6.03), followed by Blood Concept Plasma and Etat Libre d'Orange Sécrétions Magnifiques — the last of which is, by reputation, deliberately difficult.

6. Houses have measurable fingerprints

Some houses release the same fragrance repeatedly. Others cover ground.

Narrowest range across their own catalogue: BORNTOSTANDOUT (0.072), Narciso Rodriguez (0.081), Bond No. 9 (0.083). Widest: Dolce & Gabbana (0.162), Tom Ford (0.156), Zara (0.155), Dior (0.147).

Dolce & Gabbana's catalogue is exactly twice as varied as Narciso Rodriguez's. Zara — a fast-fashion retailer — covers more olfactory ground than Dior.

7. One material is in everything

Musk appears in 28.2% of the entire catalogue — more than one fragrance in four — followed by bergamot (25.0%), amber (23.2%) and vanilla (23.0%). It is also in slow decline, from 40.1% of 1990s releases to 28.1% of 2020s ones, and remains the closest thing perfumery has to a universal ingredient.

Limitations

Published in full, because a study you cannot check is not worth citing.

Two axes are not independent. Risk and texture correlate at r = +0.68, warmth and sweetness at r = +0.42. The five axes are not five orthogonal measurements, and findings leaning on risk or texture should be read as directional — section 4 especially.

68% of rows carry modelled axis scores — derived from composition rather than observed from documented wear reports. Warmth and sweetness survive this well, because composition predicts them reliably. Projection, risk and texture describe how a fragrance behaves in a room and on skin, which a note list cannot express. Where no wear data exists those scores sit near the middle by design, which makes group differences conservative rather than exaggerated.

31% of rows have no verified release year and are excluded from every time series. The era analysis rests on 3,648 dated fragrances.

Note frequencies count listed notes, not measured content. A note listed by a brand is a marketing claim as much as a formulation fact. The oakmoss finding is robust to this — brands had no incentive to stop listing a material they were still using — but it is the correct caveat.

This is a curated catalogue, not a census. It over-represents fragrances people ask about and under-represents the very obscure.

Method

Five axes, 0–1, scored per fragrance. Warmth and sweetness are derived from composition; projection, risk and texture from documented reception where it exists. Distance from centre is Euclidean distance in standardised five-axis space. House spread is the mean per-axis standard deviation within a house, restricted to houses with 25 or more entries. Era analysis buckets by verified release year.

Free to cite and republish with attribution to Zenyra.