About ScentWise

I'm Kerem Toker. I started ScentWise in 2025 because I love perfume and I was tired of how hard it is to find one you will actually wear. This page explains who is behind the site, where the data comes from, how the recommendations are made, and how the site makes money.

Who runs this site

ScentWise is a one-person project. I build the app, maintain the database, write and update the guides, and answer the email. There is no editorial team behind the byline; when a guide says "By Kerem Toker", that is literally who wrote and last checked it. You can read more about me on my author page.

The site started in 2025 as a personal project. I had been collecting and reading about perfume for years, and I kept running into the same problem: the buying process never got easier. Department-store testers are rushed, online reviews contradict each other, and a bad blind buy costs real money. I wanted a tool that would start from the person, not from the shelf, so I built one. It is still run by one person, and it still exists because I like perfume more than is sensible.

What ScentWise does

ScentWise is an AI-powered fragrance advisor. You tell it something about yourself, through a chat, a photo of your outfit, your zodiac sign, your favorite music, or the name of a perfume you wish you could afford, and it surfaces fragrances that fit. There are seven discovery modes because people think about scent in very different ways:

• AI Chat Advisor — describe what you want in plain language, get specific bottle recommendations
• Dupe Finder — paste an expensive fragrance, get affordable alternatives ranked by scent similarity
• Photo Style Scan — upload a picture of your outfit or aesthetic, get fragrances that match the visual mood
• Zodiac Match — your sign maps to fragrance families that suit its temperament
• Music to Fragrance — a genre or artist translates into matching scent profiles
• Style Match — describe your wardrobe (streetwear, minimalist, corporate, bohemian) for scents that fit it
• Celebrity Fragrance Explorer — browse what 101 celebrities are documented as wearing

Where the database comes from

The heart of ScentWise is a database of over 65,000 perfumes, each with brand, concentration, and for the better-documented entries top, heart and base notes, accords, and a community rating. I assembled it from publicly available fragrance metadata, manufacturer-published note pyramids, and structured data from open fragrance encyclopedias, then normalised, de-duplicated and re-categorised everything into one consistent taxonomy of families and accords so the AI can reason across it.

The whole database loads in your browser. Search, filtering and browsing happen locally with no server round-trip, which keeps it fast on slow connections and means I never need to log what you search for.

Two honest limits: the database does not contain prices, so any price range in a guide is my own estimate at the time of writing and can drift; and note listings for lesser-known releases are only as good as their public sources.

How the recommendations are made

Recommendations are generated by Google Gemini, a large language model that handles both text and images, which is what lets the chat advisor and the photo scan share one system. The model is grounded in the database: when it suggests a perfume, that perfume is a real product with real notes and a real brand, not something invented for the answer.

The guides on the blog are a different thing. They are written and maintained by me, not generated on the fly, and I am in the middle of reworking the thinner ones so that every list reflects fragrances I have actually worn or sampled, with my own notes on performance. Where a guide is still a note-based shortlist rather than a tested one, I would rather say so than pretend otherwise.

How the site makes money

I want this to be completely clear, because it affects how you should read the site:

• Premium access. Browsing the database and the first AI recommendation are free, plus two more after you share your email. If you want more, Premium is a one-time $10 payment for lifetime access with 500 AI queries a month. There is no subscription. This covers the cost of the AI calls.
• Affiliate links. "Shop on Amazon" buttons and some retailer links are affiliate links. If you buy through them I earn a small commission; the price you pay is the same. Every guide that contains them carries a disclosure at the top. Commissions never decide which fragrances appear in a list or how they are ranked.
• Display advertising. Some pages may show ads. Ads are clearly marked and are never mixed into the recommendations themselves.

I do not sell your data and there is no account to create. Details are in the Privacy Policy.

Contact

The best way to reach me is by email at scentwise.com@gmail.com. I read every message and aim to reply within 48 hours on business days. Bug reports, corrections to a guide, and arguments about whether Aventus has really gotten worse since the early batches are all welcome. The Contact page has a form as well.