A reading-room for independent perfume.

A catalogue of fragrances made by independent houses: every scent with its notes (top, heart and base when the maker gives them), its olfactive families, concentration, sizes and prices, an image, and a link to buy it from the people who made it. Every house with its country, city, founder, founding year and the story it tells about itself.

You can search by anything: free text, a note, a family, a house, a country, a concentration, a price, or whether something is in stock. Your shelf is a private list kept in your own browser; there are no accounts.

The privacy policy sets out the little the site stores about a visit; the terms of use cover the rest.

Everything comes from the makers’ own websites. A small crawler visits each house every month or two, reads the public product and about pages, and files what it finds. It behaves the way a polite visitor would:

• It obeys robots.txt and never works around bot protection. A site that asks not to be read is not crawled; if it appears at all, it is by link only.
• It fetches at most one page a second and keeps a local copy for a day so re-runs do not hit the site again. A few script-heavy pages are opened in a browser, which also loads the scripts those pages need.
• It identifies itself honestly. The user agent is UndernotesBot/1.0 (+https://undernotes.com/about; non-commercial fragrance library; contact https://undernotes.com), which links back to this page.
• Marketplaces such as Etsy are never crawled; an Etsy-only house gets a page with its story and a link.

Reading the pages into structured fields (which product is a perfume, which words are notes, which family a note belongs to) is automated, and that step is only ever allowed to classify and extract. Where a house has written no description or story at all, the library writes a short neutral one and labels it as such on the page, so you always know whose words you are reading.

The journal and the comparison write-ups are written from this library’s own data, the notes, prices and houses you can see on the page, and every house, fragrance and note they name is checked against the library before publication.

Descriptions and stories are reproduced verbatim from the maker, with a link to the page they came from. Images are the makers’ product photographs, resized for the page and credited. They remain the makers’ property; the library claims nothing.

Every fragrance links out to the maker’s site or to the shop that sells it. There are no affiliate links, no advertising, no sponsored placements and no monetization of any kind. Featured houses on the front page rotate by the calendar. Nothing here can be bought, and no house has paid to be included.

Independence is a judgement, so here is the one this library applies. A house is listed when, as far as we can tell:

• It is owned and run by the people who make the perfume: the founder, or a founder and a named perfumer working together, rather than a brand team briefing a fragrance supplier.
• It is not owned by a group (no conglomerate, licensing deal or private-equity portfolio behind it), and it is not a celebrity or fashion-house line.
• It sells directly from its own site or a handful of stockists it chooses, in small batches, hand-filled more often than not.

Scale is not the test: a two-person studio with sixty scents and a one-person attar maker with four both belong. A house that stops meeting the test is taken off the list. If you think a listing fails the test, or that a house we have missed passes it, say so below.

New houses are found by weekly discovery runs and by readers. If you make perfume independently, or you know someone who does, suggest the house: a name and a website are enough. Suggestions are checked by hand before anything is crawled, and a house is only added if its site can be read politely.

Makers can ask for anything on their pages to be corrected, replaced or removed, including their descriptions, images and story, and the request is honoured without argument. Wrong notes, prices or facts are fixed on the next crawl once flagged.

Use the suggestion form: give the house name, the page on undernotes.com that should change, and what should happen to it.