Every sensory material a designer works with has a shared language. Colour has the Pantone system — a designer in Singapore and a factory in Portugal can align on exactly the same shade with a four-digit code. Music has MIDI and standard notation — a composer can specify a melody that any musician in the world can read and play. Textile has fibre taxonomy, weave classification, GSM weights.
Scent has none of this.
If you are a fashion designer, a hotel creative director, a product developer — and you want to commission a fragrance — you have no structured vocabulary to work with. You point at things you like and hope the perfumer understands what you mean. You say "warm but not heavy, a bit like a library, maybe something woody." The perfumer translates that as best they can. The result is either lucky or frustrating, and there is no systematic way to close the gap.
This is not because fragrance is inherently unclassifiable. It is because the fragrance industry has, by design, kept its vocabulary proprietary. The major ingredient suppliers — Givaudan, IFF, Symrise — run their own training programmes, which are accessible only to their own employees. The independent schools that exist are expensive, geographically concentrated in France, and produce a tiny number of graduates each year. The knowledge exists. It just isn't shared.
We think that needs to change.
The Oo Fragrance Table is an open classification system for fragrance accords — a structured vocabulary for describing, comparing, and encoding scent compositions.
It defines 27 discrete olfactive accords, organised in a periodic table format. The spatial position of each accord encodes real information: position on the table corresponds to molecular weight, volatility, and temporal behaviour on skin. Reading from top-left to bottom-right follows the arc of how a fragrance unfolds — from the lightest, most fleeting top notes through to the heaviest base fixatives.
| Top notes | Ci · Al · Aq · Oz · Fr · Pe · Te · Gr · Ar — lightest, most volatile |
|---|---|
| Heart notes | Fl · Vi · Mg · Wf · Ja · Ro · Os · Sp — structural core |
| Base notes | Le · Or · Va · Go · Am · Wo · Od · Mu — fixatives, longest persistence |
| Historical refs | Fu · Cy — cross-tier compositional references |
Each accord is identified by a two-letter code. A fragrance profile is expressed as a weighted vector — Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary accords, in notation like Ro(P) · Am(S) · Mu(T). That string is machine-readable, searchable, comparable, and can be used to train AI models on a consistent vocabulary. It is also human-readable: a perfumer, a designer, and a developer can all look at the same profile string and understand what it means.
This is what PANTONE did for colour. What MIDI did for music. Fragrance has never had its equivalent — until now.
We could have kept this proprietary. We didn't, for two reasons.
First, a classification system is only useful if it is widely adopted. A vocabulary spoken by one company is a dialect. A vocabulary spoken by an industry is a standard. For the Oo Fragrance Table to become the reference layer it is designed to be — embedded in briefs, cited in research, integrated into software — it needs to be freely available to everyone.
Second, we genuinely believe this belongs to the community. The taxonomy has been developed through years of hands-on perfumery practice, workshop data, and classification work across thousands of fragrance compositions. But the underlying logic — that scent should be describable in structured, shareable terms — is not something any single company should own.
The taxonomy is published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0). It is freely available on GitHub, citable by DOI, and governed through a public RFC process. Anyone can use it, build on it, teach it, or contribute to it. Chemistry of Oo, our taxonomy and education practice, maintains stewardship over the schema and versioning — not ownership of the knowledge.
A structured olfactory vocabulary is not just useful for perfumers. It is infrastructure.
For designers, it means being able to specify and brief fragrance the same way you specify colour or material — with precision, with shared reference, with the ability to evaluate what you receive against what you asked for.
For educators, it means a curriculum foundation for teaching scent as a design material. Design schools currently have no framework for olfactory thinking. The taxonomy provides one, and we are actively piloting workshops that use it as the basis for a structured introduction to scent as a design material.
For researchers, it means a citable, versioned reference layer for olfaction studies — a DOI-registered specification that can be referenced in papers and used as a basis for corpus building and AI training.
For developers, it means a machine-readable accord schema that can be integrated into recommendation engines, similarity search, and generative fragrance tools.
The taxonomy is published. The next step is getting it used.
We are proposing pilot workshops with design and fashion institutions in Singapore — 90-minute sessions where students classify fragrance accords using the taxonomy, developing olfactory literacy the same way they already develop literacy in colour, texture, and material. Student classifications contribute to an open corpus. The sessions generate case studies. The case studies become the basis for longer institutional partnerships.
We are also inviting creative practitioners — designers, artists, architects — to use the taxonomy in their own work and share what they make with it. The goal is to build a body of public work that demonstrates what olfactory design thinking looks like when it has a structured vocabulary to work with.
If you are a practitioner who wants to use the Oo Fragrance Table in your work, or an educator who wants to explore what a workshop looks like, we would like to hear from you.
The full specification is published at:
Zenodo DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20031930
GitHub: github.com/Chemistry-of-Oo/fragrance-table
Interactive table: oola-lab.com/pages/fragrance-table
CC BY 4.0 — free to use, share, and adapt with attribution.
Chemistry of Oo is the taxonomy and education practice of Oo La Lab, a Singapore-based fragrance house. We make perfume-making kits, run workshops, and now, apparently, build open standards.
