PERFUMIST

PERFUMIST has been on the App Store since May 2013, which in fragrance-app terms is close to geological. Most of this category is a burst of enthusiasm followed by four years of silence, so longevity is the first thing worth saying: it is still shipping, with version 6.8.1 released in April 2026 and an Android update in July 2026. It is free.

The feature that earns its place is the barcode scanner. Standing in a shop or holding a bottle from a house you cannot place, scanning is simply faster and more reliable than typing a half-remembered name into a search box, and it is the one thing a spreadsheet cannot do. Around that sits an olfactory profile quiz, a retailer locator, and a catalogue the App Store describes as over 50,000 perfumes from nearly 2,000 brands. Some secondary write-ups quote 60,000 and 2,400; we quote the store's own figure, because that is the one the maker publishes.

It is built by Frederick Besson and run out of France, with enough industry standing to appear in travel-retail trade press. Worth knowing before you download: the reception splits hard by platform. iOS rates it 4.4 across 545 ratings; Android sits at 3.5 across 12,800 reviews on over a million installs. That gap is wide enough to be a real signal rather than noise, so temper expectations if you are on Android.

It is a cataloguing and identification tool, not a recommendation engine with a point of view. Use it to know what something is; come to us for whether it is worth buying.