Showoff Saturday: Built a fast, ad-free relational encyclopedia for 12,000+ perfumes and 3,600+ aroma chemicals (Olfactionary)

Hey everyone,

As a side project, I wanted to build an alternative to legacy fragrance databases that are notoriously plagued by 10+ ad networks, sluggish client-side rendering, and bloated tracking scripts.

The project is Olfactionary.

The Engineering & Data Challenge:

Relational Scale: Built a structured relational schema linking 12,000+ fragrances, 980+ houses, and 230+ perfumers to 3,600+ individual aroma chemicals/botanicals across 17 olfactory families.

Data Integrity: Rather than scraping raw marketing copy, entries are triangulated against patent filings, academic research, PubChem records, and IFRA standards with verification tags.

Performance Focus: Prioritized instant client-side search indexing and lightweight page weights to ensure sub-second loads without algorithmic feeds.

Open Literature: Digitized and indexed out-of-copyright historical perfumery texts dating back to antiquity.

Would love feedback on search latency, UI responsiveness, and suggestions on how you'd handle deep relational filtering at this scale.

Live link: https://olfactionary.com