About ScentSearch

ScentSearch is an AI-powered scent discovery platform. It helps you find candles, fragrance oils, and related products by the notes, moods, and scent profiles you actually want — not just by brand or category.

Describe what you’re looking for (cedar and lavender, a cozy date-night scent, something that smells like a perfume you already love) and ScentSearch surfaces matching products from the catalog, along with the scent notes and details we have for each, and links to buy.

How It Works

Search by scent notes, mood, or a product you already know. The system matches your query against product notes and profiles, then ranks the best fits. You can compare options side-by-side, explore scent guides, or take a short quiz if you’re not sure where to start.

Where Scent Notes Come From

Most scent notes come from the merchant’s own listing or product page. Where a source doesn’t publish them, some notes are AI-assisted — we record where each note came from, and we don’t treat AI-derived notes with the same confidence as documented ones. We also don’t invent detail a source didn’t provide, including top/middle/base breakdowns.

Our Goal

We want scent discovery to feel simple and intuitive. Whether you’re after something woody, fresh, gourmand, smoky, or complex, ScentSearch is built to help you find it faster — and to make exploring new fragrance profiles enjoyable rather than overwhelming.

Independence

ScentSearch is an independent discovery platform. We are not a manufacturer or retailer. Many product links are affiliate links, which means we may earn a small commission if you make a purchase, at no extra cost to you.

About the Author

ScentSearch and its making guides are written by Bryan Schmidt.

The site started with a practical problem. He was trying to compare fragrance oils across a handful of supplier sites and couldn’t work out how one teakwood differed from another — same name, different formulas, nothing on the page to tell them apart. The same thing turned out to be true of finished candles, scattered across a dozen retailers with no way to compare them side by side. You end up buying whichever one is in front of you rather than the one you actually wanted.

Both halves of this site come from that. The search tool exists because the products are scattered. The fragrance oil guide exists because the same name genuinely does mean different things from one bottle to the next.

Bryan holds a BS in Computer Engineering and served in the US Navy submarine force as a nuclear electrician’s mate, reaching Chief Petty Officer. Since 2020 he has worked as a Senior Reactor Operator at civilian nuclear plants. His professional training is in thermal systems — heat transfer, thermodynamics, and how materials behave under thermal stress.

He is not a chandler. He has poured candles and spent time experimenting with fragrance combinations while working toward a candle line of his own, currently paused while he works on ScentSearch. He has not sold candles commercially and makes no claim to production experience or industry standing.

The making guides came out of that experiment. Working through the published advice on wicks, wax, fragrance and vessels, he kept finding that it contradicted itself — different wick sizes recommended for the same jar, opposite causes given for the same defect, figures for one named wax that varied from seller to seller. Rather than picking a source and hoping, he worked out why they disagreed.

That is why these guides read the way they do. The vessel guide is about thermal shock. The wax guide is about crystallisation kinetics. The wick guide is about capillary flow and heat transfer. Those mechanisms are what sit underneath the disagreement, and they are the part of this that his training actually covers.

What that means for you: these guides are research, not manufacturing experience. Where a manufacturer’s or supplier’s guidance differs from anything on them, follow theirs. How each guide is sourced and checked is set out in our Editorial Standards.