Data study · Zenyra

What perfumery started using

Pink pepper went from almost nothing to the fastest-rising material in perfumery. Oud rose further still, then retreated — the only complete trend cycle in the catalogue. Measured across 3,707 dated fragrances.

1. The materials that arrived

These are share-of-palette figures, so they are not competing with the departures on the companion page for the same space in a fixed list. They describe what perfumers reached for more often.

2. Pink pepper is the defining material of contemporary perfumery

Pink pepper is the steepest riser in the catalogue: 0.16% to 1.69% of all notes listed, a tenfold increase, and it is still climbing rather than levelling. It is now listed more often than oud was at the height of the oud boom.

It is an unusual thing to be famous without being discussed. Oud, vanilla and ambroxan all have a literature. Pink pepper mostly appears in top-note lists without comment, and yet if you asked what a fragrance released in the 2020s is most likely to open with that no fragrance of 1995 would have, this is the answer.

3. Oud is the only complete cycle in the data

Oud rises from 0.11% to 0.89% to 1.74%, then falls back to 0.91% in the 2020s. It roughly halves from its 2010s peak.

Trend cycles in perfumery are usually asserted from memory. This one is measured, and the shape is unambiguous: a material that was effectively absent from Western mainstream release in the 1990s, became a defining feature of the 2010s, and has since receded to about half its peak without returning to obscurity. It did not fail. It stopped being a signal.

Saffron, which rose alongside it, has not retreated — it continues climbing to 1.13%. The palette that arrived with oud outlasted oud itself, which suggests what moved was a broader set of materials rather than a single fashionable note.

4. Where the new materials came from

The houses releasing most actively in the catalogue are, by median release year, Middle Eastern: Fragrance World, Zimaya and Maison Asrar all have median years of 2022 or later, against Balenciaga at 1989 and Aramis at 1994.

Oud and saffron are the two materials most associated with that tradition, and both rise by more than 600%. Ambroxan is the counter-case and worth stating plainly: it is a synthetic with no such lineage, absent from the dataset before 2000, and it rises too. The arrival of new materials is not one story.

How these figures are measured

The obvious measure — what percentage of releases list a note — is unreliable across decades, because listing density is not constant. Entries from the 1990s carry 9.24 notes on average; entries from the 2010s carry 6.60. A material used exactly as much as before will appear to decline by roughly a quarter, purely because the denominator changed.

Every figure here is therefore a share of all notes listed in that decade, which is immune to that effect. A finding is reported only where the share moves by at least 35% relative. That threshold is a judgement rather than a statistical test, and is stated so it can be argued with.

This is not a hypothetical correction. Musk falls from 39.9% to 28.0% of releases and reads as a clear decline; by share it moves from 4.54% to 4.78%, meaning it did not decline at all. We published the uncorrected reading before running this check, and have since corrected it.

Limitations

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

Note lists are marketing claims as much as formulation facts. They record what a brand chose to publish, not what a gas chromatograph would find. This matters most where a material has a marketing value out of proportion to its use.

31% of the catalogue has no verified release year and is excluded from every time series. The analysis rests on 3,707 dated fragrances with note data, and the 1990s column is the thinnest at 198 entries.

This is a curated catalogue, not a census. It over-represents fragrances people ask about and under-represents the very obscure, so it describes what was widely released and discussed rather than everything that existed.

No axis scores appear on this page. Warmth and sweetness are reliable, but projection, risk and texture are modelled for most rows and are not independent of each other, so they are kept out of a study that does not need them.

Figures are revised as the catalogue grows. Last recomputed 6 August 2026 against 3,707 dated fragrances. The catalogue is periodically extended, so a rerun months from now will return slightly different values; the direction and magnitude of every finding here has been stable across revisions. Cite the date alongside the figure if precision matters.

Small early denominators inflate percentage changes. Pink pepper’s “+956%” starts from 0.16%, and a rise from a very low base always produces a dramatic ratio. The absolute movement — 0.16 to 1.69 percentage points of the palette — is the more honest way to read it, and it is the one to quote.

Ambroxan is under-counted by construction. It frequently appears in formulations without being listed, because it functions as a base rather than a advertised note. Its true trajectory is steeper than shown here, which is a reason to treat that row as a floor rather than a measurement.

Use this

Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Reproduce any figure with credit and a link. Reproducible from the published catalogue via scripts/materials_study.py.

Companion study: what perfumery stopped using, and the broader Fragrance Taste Index.