I built Petrichor as a way for me to track my perfume wears, and it’s been a year now since I stared tracking what I’m wearing. One of the things I built early on was a way for me to visualize my wears using a bubble chart and also a more traditional bar chart, and more recently I built a feature where I can view all my wears of a particular perfume, say Parfums Dusita Melodie de L'Amour.

It got me thinking that it would interesting to visualize these discrete data (perfumes) on a calendar – for those in tech, kind of like a Github commit history crossed with a dot matrix chart.

A Year In Perfumes

Hover mouse over a square to see the perfume

Unlike a Github commit history where you have one type of data (commits) that you visualize on a calendar based on quantity (how many commits in a given day), this graph is visualizing many discreet items (perfumes) – each color represents a specific perfume – on a calendar. Hovering over any square above will tell you what perfume I wore that day.

I think what’s cool about visualizing this kind of data (many discreet items) over a long period of time are the distributions and clustering you can observe.

Caveats

I think there is a happy balance between small number of discreet data points and too many discreet data points: for example, this graph becomes less useful if you wear only a couple of perfumes throughout the year, but it also becomes less useful if you’re wearing a new perfume every single day of the year (yes, I know people who do this!).

Total Perfumes Worn

I wore a total of 137 perfumes in the period between April 21st 2020 and April 21st 2021. Of course, I do not own that many perfumes; most were samples.

Most Worn Perfumes

My most worn perfume during this period was Senyokô Duo des Fleurs, followed closely by Shalini Parfum Jardin Nocturne. Most of the perfumes you see above on this list are also my favorite perfumes of all time, but there are notable exceptions: as much as I like Lubin’s Idole de Lubin it’s not a perfume I’m in love with – I like it, and find it very versatile, and it was an easy pick for days when I didn’t want to think too much about what to wear.

Most Worn Perfume Category

Hover mouse over a square to see the perfume category

Since there are fewer categories than perfumes, collapsing all my perfume wears into categories gives a more interesting view of what kinds of perfumes I gravitate towards.

In order for the data to be useful, I classified each perfume into exactly one category. I went specific where it made sense, but generally tried to be broad, and included categories like “Amber”, “Aromatic Fougere”, “Chypre”, “Leather”, “Floral”, “Woody Floral”, “Incense”, “Tobacco”, etc. – all in all 22 categories. Of course, there’s nothing scientific about my categorization. Many perfumes in my collection probably fall into multiple categories, but I wanted to keep it simple.

Any guesses for what my kind of perfume I wore the most? Of course, florals!

I seem to really like perfumes that are some kind of floral, woody or some combination of both of them. I wore florals 161 times, and if you include other kinds of florals, a total of 209 times!

Overrated Perfumes

Since I love perfumes so much I obviously try a lot of perfumes. It’s natural that I try a particular perfume once and then never wear it again because it’s just not for me. There are a lot of perfumes in the community that get talked about a lot – they tend to be hyped through networked marketing, or they really are very likeable.

These are perfumes that I had a lot of expectations from that I tried at least once that didn’t live up to those expectations. I have now learned not to trust the hype. To be fair, all of these are pretty good perfumes, but not the masterpieces many make them out to be – at least for me.

Roja Parfums Danger Pour Homme

The hype train is expected with anything from Roja Parfums, and like many of his perfumes, I can’t quite tell what is so wondrous about this definitely overpriced, but otherwise pretty good chypre.

Parfums de Marly Herod

A very pleasant, but ultimately very boring, tobacco vanilla perfume. I suppose Parfums de Marly strikes an interesting balance between mass-appealing with some semblance of quality that draws the crowds? I’m not sure.

Nishane Hacivat

I might get some flack for this, but again, a very pleasant, versatile, fruity-aromatic woody scent, but also very boing.

Xerjoff Naxos

Another hugely popular sweet, tobacco-vanilla scent that’s very likeable, but also boring.

Les Indemodables Vanille Havane

Les Indemodables is a house whose perfumes I keep going back to. Many of their perfumes, like Fougere Emeraude, created by perfumer Florence Fouillet Dubois have a minimalist construction, but to great olfactory effect. Vanille Havane, released in 2021, is a very likeable sweet-boozy-tobacco-vanilla scent created by well-regarded perfumer Antoine Lie. I think it’s quite nice, but not the best offering from the house.

Fragrances I keep going back to but Don’t Own

These are perfumes I have tried at least twice, perfumes that I come back to because I find them intriguing, but am not fully committed to.

St. Clair Scents Casablanca

I keep going back to Casablanca, a full-bodied, floral extravaganza that you need to commit yourself to. You could say that I find it spellbinding and intriguing, but I also find it extremely potent in a way that I’m not never quite sure when I’d wear it.

Bogue Profumo Maai

There’s few things more beautiful than the drydown of this ethereal, animalic floral. It’s also the perfect amount of aldehydes for my taste, and yet I haven’t found myself committed to it.

Zoologist Perfumes Tyrannosaurus Rex

Antonio Gardoni manages to do this thing with resins and florals where the resins appear ethereal and the florals appear to have some heft, it’s as though he manages to transpose the qualities of one onto the other. I’m also a big fan of the way he incorporates the champaca here (and also in Bogue Lita) – rich, slightly dirty, dithered.

Comme des Garçons Kyoto

Comme des Garçons Kyoto is a very light and fresh take on incense: it is as much about the cypress and cedar as it is is about incense. An easy wear that I kept going back to when I was on the road earlier in the year. Do I absolutely love it? Not clear.

Colophon

I used data I logged on Petrichor for this analysis. I wrote some code, inspired by react-calendar-heatmap, to generate the heatmap-style calendar dot matrix. I used Ramda to run some quick transformations on the data.