Who makes this, and why

Why it exists

Orris Bench was not designed from a list of features. It was assembled, one part at a time, out of afternoons that went wrong at a working bench and should not have gone wrong twice.

A bottle whose label said it was empty, sitting there full. A dilution nobody could trace back to the lot it was made from. A material recorded under two spellings and counted once. Each of those is why some specific, unglamorous part of the application exists: the stock ledger, the parent lot on a dilution, the reconciliation by CAS. None of them was thought of in the abstract.

The compliance side arrived the same way. Checking a blend against the IFRA Standards by hand, for a formula built out of naturals and bench dilutions, is arithmetic that takes an evening and is wrong in a way nobody notices. Doing it once is instructive. Doing it every time a formula changes is what software is for.

Who makes it

A small independent operation in the eurozone. Not venture funded, not a side project of a larger company that could drop it when its priorities move, and not a team that has to grow into a market before the thing is finished.

It is written by somebody who runs a bench and uses it on his own work before anybody else sees it. That is the reason the awkward parts are built at all: the weigh sheet against a connected balance, the composition that drills through a natural into what is actually inside it, the verdict stored with the batch rather than recomputed later. Those are not the parts you build to demonstrate software. They are the parts you build because you needed them on a Tuesday.

What it refuses to do

The most important behavior in the whole application is that it says when it does not know. A compliance check that has not been able to see inside a material reports that it cannot verify that line, rather than returning a clean result that was only clean because nobody looked. A pass that was never earned is worse than no pass, because somebody acts on it.

It also does not hold your work. The database is a file on your own machine. Everything in it exports to formats you can read without this software. There is no cloud service it depends on to run, and if this operation disappeared tomorrow the copy you installed keeps working and your formulas stay where they are. Software that holds your regulatory records should not be able to hold them hostage, and that is a design decision rather than a promise.

Built in the open

The roadmap on this site is generated from the same map the work is done against, so it cannot claim what the map does not. It counts what is built, and then counts separately what has been put through its paces by hand at a real bench, because those are two different claims and running them together publishes the weaker one as though it were the stronger.

The software is not on sale yet. There is no price on this site and no way to buy anything, and there will not be until it is ready.

Why the guides are here

The guides on this site exist because the same questions kept being asked, and because the answers available elsewhere are often confidently wrong. The number of declarable EU fragrance allergens is quoted as 26 on most pages that mention it, and has not been 26 for some time. Thresholds get repeated an order of magnitude out. Dates get borrowed from a different regulation on the same page.

So every figure in them is checked against the primary text or against the published data before it is written, and the sources are named at the foot of each page. They are free to read, they ask for nothing, and they are useful whether or not you ever install anything.

What they are not is advice about your product. Whether a particular fragrance is safe to sell is a question for a qualified safety assessor.

The name

Orris is the material that most rewards keeping a record and waiting, and a bench is where the work is actually done. The full story of the name is on the front page, and it is worth the two minutes.