Fragrance house Givaudan has designed a free iPhone application designed to help consumers navigate the perfume market both in-store and online. The company has used information from its Miriad 2.0, winner of this year’s FiFi Technological Breakthrough of the Year for Fragrance for Fragrance Creation & Formulation, to create a database of over 4,000 prestige fragrances to form the consumer guide in the iPerfumer.
— Read more at Givaudan unveils perfume i-Phone app at Cosmetics Business. iPerfumer can be found now in the App Store at iTunes.
Would love to hear from anyone who’s had a chance to play with this. I’m always extremely doubtful that they’ll get the preference algorithm right, but who knows?
I just downloaded it last night, haven’t had a chance to play with it yet. Will report back!
Robin, please let us know how it compares to just carring a copy of “The Guide” – which I usually have with me. 🙂
Just spent 10 minutes with it. It’s a recommendation engine: you tell it which fragrances you like, it tells you what else you might like, that’s all. I would guess that like many such engines, the more you rate, the better your recommendations will be.
It does also tell you what overall rating (from other users) a fragrance has, but there’s no wealth of detail on each scent. One example: Balenciaga Paris. We learn the launch year, that it’s a feminine, and that it’s a powdery floral. That’s it — no text reviews or descriptions, no notes, etc.
Will also add that once you tell it you’re a woman, it is only going to show you feminine & unisex scents, to see men’s I guess you’d have to enter a 2nd profile.
And it’s not as up to date as I’d hope. For women, it lists a total of 5 new launches: Voyage d’Hermes, MM Untitled, Infusion d’Tubereuse, Balenciaga Paris & Marc Jacobs Lola. Things that have been out for months (Oriens, Ninfeo Mio, Beyonce Heat) are not in there.
Oh, but that’s interesting — gathering the info from other users. So it has the potential to turn into an MUA kind of thing (minus the all-important actual community of course, that allows you to tell whether or not the reviewer knows what they’re talking about). Is there room for comments, or is it just numbers?
Sorry for all the questions–can’t download apps! (Note to self: get a twenty-first century phone…)
Ok…I was wrong…if you rate men’s fragrances, it will include them in the recommendations. No way to move around by brand name, which is a definite minus.
No place for comments that I can find. This is the first version, so presumably they might improve it, but if they aren’t going to keep it up to date I don’t think I’ll find it useful even for checking fragrance family, which is about all I can see using it for.
Everything is on a 5 star rating system. There are (very) small pictures of some scents, but not all.
Checked this out on the App store. The application gets a 3 out of 5 based on 8 reviews. Not much to go on there. Tempted to download it (it’s free) to see if it’s worthwhile.
Can’t hurt unless you’re out of space…
Someone should bring out a version of The Guide for iPhone, that’d be pretty handy.
That would be a smart move…
I would totally purchase that for my iPod Touch. I love reading entries from The Guide whenever I go to the bookstore. The man left me jonesing for Jicky last time!
Would love this in Droid format.
No idea what their long term plans are, but I’d think that would be worth releasing…
I left my iPhone at home or I’d be downloading it right now. It doesn’t sound all that useful but maybe later as Robin said that may change.
On my iPhone, I have an inventory listing of all my samples and bottles. It’s a nice app called MyStuff. You can customize it any way you’d like, complete with images. It’s been useful for keeping up with how I feel about scents – whether full FB worthy, etc. I also like to put links in it of reviews.
Thanks for the info!
p.s. I too would love an app for ‘The Guide’.!
Oh, I’ll have to check out mystuff!
Awesome. Another ap I can gently beat the DH with a feather into downloading on his new ‘smart phone’/glorified blackjack machine… Or is it retro Atari games this week? 🙂
LOL at “glorified blackjack machine”…
I’ve been playing around with it for a few days. Your criticism is right on. My hope is that if there’s a large response they’ll keep improving it. We can write useful comments when we rate it and hope someone takes our suggestions seriously. OK, that’s a lot of hoping, I know. For now it’s nice to know someone thought perfume was important enough to create an app for.
Given how little info they’re providing for each scent, you would think they could at least keep it updated with a reasonably comprehensive list of new scents. Let’s hope!
At least it’s a start – although I’m going to check out the My Stuff app and see how difficult it would be to convert my spreadsheet. What I really want is an app that includes the Guide, plus reviews from NST, PST, and the Posse – as it is, I end up trying to pull the websites up on Safari and it takes longer than a free-standing app would.
Cynthia, one thing that helps is to get the Google app. It will save your searches. All my saved searches are for perfume reviews! Try it and see what you think.
Thanks for the tip – I’ll definitely try that one!