Perfumery software
The whole of making a fragrance, on one bench.
Orris Bench is a desktop application for anyone who makes fragrances, from a single perfumer to a house with a team. Build and scale formulas, work from a real ingredient library, stay compliant with IFRA and the EU allergen rules, produce the labels, safety data sheets and product files a product needs, and trace every batch back to the lot of every material. Your data lives on your own machine, or on a shared database on a server the house runs itself when more than one person works from it, whatever town each of them is in.
What Orris Bench does
The whole path from a formula on the bench to a bottle a customer can read the label of, in one application. It runs on your own machine, or against a shared database on a server you run when a team works from the same library, whatever town each of them is in.
Formulas and versions
Build a formula, scale it to any batch size, and keep every version. Watch the pyramid balance as you work, save a band as an accord to reuse, and compare two formulas side by side.
A real ingredient library
Over 4,500 ingredients to start from, with their CAS numbers, INCI names and hazard classifications already loaded. Look a new one up by CAS or name, record where each sits in the pyramid, and find a substitute when one is out or discontinued.
IFRA compliance
Assess a blend against the IFRA Standards, at the category it is sold in and before it is made, across all twelve categories and their subcategories. The verdict names the amendment it used, says what it checked, and says cannot verify rather than a false pass.
Allergen declarations
The fragrance allergens named over threshold, in INCI order, for the market you are actually selling into: the EU Annex III list, or the shorter one Great Britain keeps. Straight from the formula that was made, so the carton and the record cannot drift apart.
Batches, traced
A batch number ties the bottle to the lot of every material and the strength that actually came off the balance. Keep the dossier; a question about a bottle can arrive years later.
Labels, SDS and product files
The label, the safety data sheet, and the Product Information File a responsible person has to hold, all generated from the same record rather than retyped.
Constituents from the supplier's own sheet
Point it at the safety data sheet your supplier already sent. It lists what is inside the material: every substance, its percentage, and the line on the page it was read from. A scanned sheet is read too, and marked for checking. Accept the rows you want and they become the composition the IFRA and allergen checks read. Nothing is saved until you say so.
The GMP records behind the statement
A GMP compliance statement has to be supportable, so the records that support it are here: procedures with versions and who acknowledged them, the balance calibrated with its certificate, training, deviations with what was decided about each, and internal audits. Kept as records rather than as a folder of documents nobody can search.
Complaints, and the clock they start
A complaint about a product is logged against the batch it came from, and a serious undesirable effect starts the twenty-calendar-day clock from the moment anyone here first knew, which is where the law puts it. The dashboard shows it while it is running, several complaints against one batch are flagged as the pattern they are, and what you notified is kept with what you sent.
Product notifications
The European notification, the Great Britain one, and the United States facility registration and product listing, each prepared from the record that made the product. Every one is stamped with the formula version it was filed against, so a reformulation since shows up as something to look at rather than passing quietly.
The weigh sheet
Weigh a batch against a connected balance, guided line by line, so what is recorded is what really went in and at the strength it truly came out.
Suppliers, stock and ordering
Where you buy each material and at what price, what is on the shelf, and what is running low, with a shopping list that already knows what to reorder.
Bottles, sales and recall
Fill a batch into bottles, and the cost per bottle comes from the lots that actually went in rather than a typed price. Follow what sold, what went to a stockist and what came back, and if a bottle ever has to be called in, the trail runs from that bottle to every material and back again.
An AI helper, local or hosted
The helper answers from your own library, and you choose the model behind it: one running on your own machine through Ollama, LM Studio or Open WebUI, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint you already use. Point it at a local model and nothing you ask leaves the machine.
A team, wherever they work
One library, one set of formulas and one batch history, on a server the house runs itself. Nobody has to be in the same room: each person signs in under their own name over an encrypted connection their machine pins to that server, their role decides what they may do, and every change carries the name of whoever made it.
Bringing your existing data across
You do not have to start from an empty screen. Orris Bench can import the formulas, materials and suppliers you already keep, and where the old records are awkward there is an optional conversion service: send what you have, and get back a library you can work from. Nothing you send is kept once the conversion is done.
It is not on sale yet. If you are weighing up a move, ask about the conversion before you plan one.
How it works
One record runs the length of the bench. Nothing is retyped, and each step reads from the last.
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Start a formula
Add materials from the library and what it holds on each one comes across with it. Type a trade name or a chemical name; it knows both.
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See it as you build
The pyramid balances live, the strength updates, and the cost of the batch is there before you commit to it. Save a band you like as an accord.
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Check it before you make it
Assess the blend against IFRA at the category it will sell in, and read the allergen declaration, while it is still cheap to change something.
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Make the batch
Weigh to the sheet on a connected balance. It records what actually came off, not what was planned, and allocates the batch number.
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Label and declare
The label, the ingredient list, the allergen declaration and the product file come out of the same record, in the order the regulation asks for.
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Trace it, forever
The batch number ties the bottle to the lot of every material and the documents behind it. Kept, not deleted, because the question comes late.
Shown up close
Most of what a formulation tool does, everything does. These are the ones a spreadsheet cannot, and the ones worth seeing rather than being told.
A supplier base, followed all the way down
what the supplier declares is inside it
dosed at 10% in your formula
The CAS just says "mixture", but the regulated substances inside it still reach your allergen declaration and your IFRA check. The math drills through every level for you. The figures here are an example; the behavior is not.
The verdict is kept with the batch, not recomputed later
The library moves on to the next IFRA amendment; the batch keeps the one it was actually judged against. Ask what a bottle met, years after it left, and the answer was recorded at the time rather than reconstructed from today's rules.
It says "not sure" rather than print a confident wrong number
Density, with nothing measured on file
0.94 g/mL estimated
Compliance, with a gap in the data
Cannot verify 2 materials have no composition
Where another tool shows a number and moves on, this shows whether the number is known. A guess wears the word estimated; a check that cannot be certain refuses to say pass. The figures are an example; the refusal to print a confident wrong number is not.
Your bottles point at a locked standard, so a typo can't break the math
each material is tied to one
each formula is built from these
Call a bottle whatever you call it on the shelf. Underneath, it is tied to one standardized ingredient you cannot edit, so the CAS a regulator reads never drifts with a keystroke. The guided import that reconciles a messy list against the standards on the way in is being built now.
You do not have to retype it
The reason people stay on a spreadsheet they have outgrown is the thought of entering it all again. So that part is not left to you.
Send what you have, in whatever shape it is in: a spreadsheet, a database from another program, a folder of files, or the notebook photographed a page at a time. We do the conversion for you, give it back to you as a working set of formulas and materials, and keep none of it once it is done.
It will not come back perfect, and anybody who tells you otherwise has not seen eight years of somebody else's shorthand. So it comes back with a reconciliation: how many materials and formulas went in, how many came out, what the totals were on both sides, and a list of every row that did not map cleanly and why. You check the forty things that need a decision instead of reading eight hundred formulas.
Asking costs nothing. Send a sample of what you have and you will get an honest answer about how awkward your particular mess is, and what converting it would cost, before you commit any time or money to it. The conversion itself is paid work, priced before any of it starts, and you pay nothing unless you accept what comes back. None of it obliges you to buy Orris Bench afterward.
Who it is for
Anyone who makes fragrances and has to meet the rules. The software is built so meeting them is part of the work rather than a second job bolted on afterward.
- One perfumer, one machine
- A perfumer working alone at a bench, with the database on your own computer. No server to rent, no account to create, and nothing that stops working when the internet does.
- A house filling its own bottles
- Formulas, batches, labels and the product file in one place, so the documents a product has to carry come out of the record that made it rather than out of a second set of spreadsheets.
- A team on a shared database, in one place or several
- The whole team works from one ingredient library, one set of formulas and one batch history, on a server the house runs itself. Nobody has to be in the same town: each person signs in under their own name over an encrypted connection, their role sets what they may do, and the trail of who changed what carries their names.
- A large house, not a different product
- Nothing here assumes a small operation. The same application runs a bench with one person and a floor with twenty. The rules are the same size whoever you are, and so is the record you have to keep.
If you keep formulas in a spreadsheet, work out allergen declarations by hand, and find out a blend was over an IFRA limit after it was made rather than before, this replaces the spreadsheet and the guesswork with one record that the formula, the compliance check, the label and the batch trail all read from.
Years of work somewhere else is not a reason to stay there. Orris Bench imports existing formulas and materials rather than making you retype them, and where a move is awkward there is a conversion service: we help you get the data across, and we keep none of it once the conversion is done. Get in touch and we will tell you what moving your data looks like before you commit to anything.
Four afternoons that should not happen twice
These all happened at the bench this was written on. None of them is a hypothetical, and none of them was anybody being careless.
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The bottle said empty. It was on the shelf, nearly full.
A gram of absolute had been diluted to ten percent, and the parent was zeroed the same evening. Both entries were correct on their own. Nothing recorded that one had become the other, so the stock was gone and the reason went with it, and it read as a corrupted database for a year and a half.
How Orris Bench solves this A dilution is made from a lot, not typed as a new one. The child carries its parent, the parent is spent rather than deleted, and the chain reads in both directions.
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The cap said absolute. The bottle was an oil, under the wrong CAS number.
Two grades of the same flower, bought years apart, written on a cap in a hurry. Nobody smells the difference between a right and a wrong CAS number, and the allergen screen does not read the cap. It reads the number.
How Orris Bench solves this The material carries its CAS, its INCI name and its EC number from a public register rather than from memory, and the screen shows all three next to the name you actually call it.
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Thirty-one dilutions were sitting in the materials list as though they were materials.
Some suppliers only sell a dilution, so it arrives as a thing you bought and gets filed as one. Then the material count is wrong, and so is everything counted from it: what you own, what you are short of, and what a formula is really made of.
How Orris Bench solves this A dilution is a strength of something, whoever made it. Buying one from a supplier does not invent a second material, and it does not pretend you diluted it yourself.
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One name showed no restriction. The same substance under its other name showed a restricted entry.
The Commission publishes against one name. A bench calls it something else. Look up the name on your shelf and the page is blank, which reads as permission and is not.
How Orris Bench solves this Restrictions are matched by CAS as well as by name, and when a rule reaches a material through another name for the same substance the screen says so, rather than showing it without explanation.
Every one of these was found by going and looking, which is the honest version of this story. Software does not stop you writing the wrong thing on a cap. It stops the wrong thing being the only record of what is in the bottle.
Your formulas are in a file you can open without us
Software should never be able to hold your work hostage. Here is exactly why this one cannot.
You do not have to trust us with your formulas, because we never receive them. There is nothing on our side to lose, leak, or be asked for.
Your work is kept in a SQLite database, which is the most widely installed database format there is: it is in every phone, every browser and a good deal of the aviation industry, the format is published, and it is readable by Python, R, LibreOffice, DB Browser and a hundred other things that have nothing to do with us. It is one file. You can copy it to a memory stick.
Every backup holds the whole of it. The copy is taken by SQLite itself rather than by copying the file, which matters more than it sounds: the database is written in a way that spreads recent changes across two files, and a backup that grabs only the obvious one is a backup missing your last afternoon of work. So each archive is the complete database, internally consistent, and openable by anything that reads the format.
There is also a spreadsheet export, for when you want the data in front of you rather than in a database: your materials with their identifiers and chemistry, your bottles with what you paid and what is left, your formulas line by line, and your batches. That one is a convenience rather than the guarantee. The guarantee is the file.
One thing is deliberately not promised here: support forever. Nobody running a business out of a single workshop can honestly promise that, and a page that did would be worth less than this one. What is promised is that you are never locked in, by anybody, including us.
Your computer
→ only when you ask for it: PubChem, or the AI endpoint you chose
Why the name
Somebody pulls a rhizome of Iris pallida out of the ground, breaks it open and smells it, and it smells of soil. There is nothing in it worth putting in a bottle. That is the beginning of the most expensive material in perfumery.
It gets peeled, dried, and laid up in a cellar, and then it is left alone for three to five years. Nobody can hurry that part, and nobody can walk past the shelf and tell how it is going. The work happening in the dark is enzymatic: precursors that smell of nothing are slowly turned into irones. When the wait is up the material smells of violets and suede and something close to face powder, and nothing else in perfumery smells like it. Standard orris butter runs around 12,000 euro a kilogram.
So orris is a material that cannot be rushed and cannot be guessed at. You find out at the end whether you were right. That is the temper this software was built with. A strength is recorded as what the balance actually read, not what the formula intended. A density nobody has measured is marked as a guess. A compliance check is allowed to answer cannot verify, because that is a different thing from a pass, and saying so is the whole point.
One more thing the name carries. The flower is violet. The rhizome, after those years, is amber, and it is the rhizome that perfumery uses, which is why this site is the color it is. As for bench: it is the plainest word available, and that is why it is in the name. A bench is a flat surface, a balance, a jar of blotters, bottles within reach, and somebody standing at it. Call the room around it a lab, a studio, or the back of the shop. The work still happens at the bench, and the bench is what this was built around.
What everyone pictures
What perfumery buys
Before you spend a euro
The questions worth answering before any software gets near your formulas.
Your data is yours
It lives on your machine, or on your team's server, and never ours. Export all of it to JSON or CSV whenever you like. Nothing here holds your work hostage.
Works offline
On your own it runs against a local database, so it works at a bench with no internet. Only five things touch the network, and only when you ask them to: PubChem, the EU ingredient register, a name lookup, the AI helper, and signing in with your own company account where somebody has turned that on.
Yours to keep
Installed on your own hardware, with no cloud service it depends on to run. If you ever stop using it, the database and everything in it is still yours and still readable.
What does it cost?
The price and the license terms are set at launch and shown here. It is desktop software you install on your own machine, so there is no cloud service to keep paying for it to keep working. To be told the day it is ready, the contact link in the footer reaches a person, not a form.
Where does my data live, and is any of it sent to you?
On your own machine, in a database you hold. A team shares one library on a server the house runs itself, and it stays the team's own. Nothing about your formulas, your customers or your orders is sent to us or to anyone else. It is your data, it stays that way, and you can export all of it at any time.
Can I try it before I buy it?
Yes. There will be a way to put your own formulas through it before you decide, because a tool for a bench has to be judged at the bench and not from a feature list.
Can I bring my existing formulas and materials in?
Yes, and you do not have to do it alone. Orris Bench has import mechanisms that bring your existing formulas and materials in rather than making you retype years of work, and those cost you nothing. For a move too awkward for them there is a paid conversion service: you send what you have, we price it before any work starts, you pay nothing unless you accept what comes back, and we keep none of your data once the conversion is done. Get in touch and we will help you move.
Do I have to type in what is inside every material?
Not when your supplier sent you a safety data sheet. Point Orris Bench at it and it reads what is inside the material off the sheet: every substance, the percentage the supplier stated, and the line on the page it was read from, so you can check a figure without opening the document again. A sheet that is a scan rather than a real document is read as well, and those rows are marked for you to check. Accept the rows you want and they become the composition the IFRA and allergen checks read. Nothing is saved until you say so, and where the sheet is unclear it says so rather than guessing. The document never leaves your machine.
Does it work without an internet connection?
Working on your own, yes. The database is on your own machine, so it works with no internet at all. The only things that reach the network are optional and asked for, and there are five of them: reading a compound from PubChem, checking the EU ingredient register, looking up whether a name is taken, the AI helper, and signing in with your own company account where a company has turned that on. Not one of them runs on a timer or at startup, and even the AI helper can run against a model on your own machine, so it works offline too. A team sharing one library is the sixth, and the one case that needs a connection, for the plain reason that the library is somewhere the rest of the team can reach it too.
Is there AI, and does it send my formulas to a cloud?
There is an AI helper, and where it runs is your choice. Point it at a model running on your own machine, through Ollama, LM Studio, Open-WebUI or anything else that speaks the OpenAI-compatible protocol, and nothing leaves your computer. Or point it at a hosted model if you would rather. Either way it stays off until you ask it something, and it talks only to the endpoint you set, never to us.
How does it keep up with IFRA and the EU rules?
IFRA publishes its Standards as a file, and Orris Bench loads it, so when a new amendment lands you bring it in and every compliance check uses it. The EU allergen and restriction data ships inside the software, and it shows you the date that data is current to and flags when it is getting old, so you know to refresh it rather than trusting a stale list. Refreshing is a file you download and import, or a software update, never a live connection to us: the software keeps working offline whether or not you ever update, and the choice to go online is always yours. It is honest about what it has loaded: a pass says exactly what it checked, and says cannot verify rather than guess.
Which markets does it handle?
The European Union, Great Britain and the United States. Which one you are selling into is a setting on the product, not an assumption: the allergen declaration follows that market's own list, the safety data sheet is written to that market's own rules, and the label carries what that market asks for. Great Britain is treated as the separate regime it now is rather than as a copy of the Union, because the two lists and the two responsible person rules have already diverged.
The notification paperwork comes out of the same record. For the European Union, every answer the portal asks for, with the composition document in the form it wants. For Great Britain, the notification recorded against a responsible person established there. For the United States, the facility registration and the product listing written as the file the FDA's own system reads, rather than as a page to retype. The certification on any of them is a declaration a named person signs, which is where the law puts it and where it stays. There are guides on this site covering all three in full, and Canada and Australia besides.
One perfumer, or a whole team in more than one place?
Either, and the team does not have to be in one building. On your own, it keeps its database on your own machine and needs nothing else. For a team, everyone works from one shared library, one set of formulas and one batch history, held on a server the house runs itself.
Each person signs in under their own name from wherever they work, over an encrypted connection that their machine checks against that one server every time it speaks to it. What each of them may do is set by their role, so the person who formulates and the person who releases a batch are not handed the same powers by accident. Every change carries the name of whoever made it, and that trail is written so it cannot be quietly rewritten afterward.
What do I need to run it?
A Windows, macOS or Linux computer. Nothing else: no server to rent, no cloud account to create, no monthly service to depend on. On Windows it installs with an installer; on macOS and Linux it is a portable archive you unpack and run. A team adds one more machine of its own to hold the shared library, and that one is yours as well.
Who makes it, and will it still be here next year?
A small independent operation in the eurozone. Not venture funded, and not a side product of a larger company that could drop it when its priorities move on.
The more useful answer is that it does not depend on us. Orris Bench is desktop software with a one time license: it installs on your own machine, and the database is a file you hold. If this operation vanished tomorrow, the copy you installed keeps running, your formulas stay exactly where they are, and everything in them exports to open formats you can read without us. That is deliberate. Software that holds your regulatory records should not be able to hold them hostage.
Coming soon
Orris Bench is in active development. It is not on sale yet, there is nothing to download today, and some of what is described here is still being built and may change before release.
When it is ready it runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, on your own computer: an installer on Windows, a portable archive you simply unpack on macOS and Linux. There is no cloud account to create and no server to rent, and it is published here, with the price and the license terms set out on the same page rather than asked for by email.
To be told when it is ready, or to ask what moving your existing formulas and materials would look like, get in touch. A person answers. If the move is awkward we will convert it for you, and we keep none of your data once it is done.