How to play Perfumdle: strategy guide

The exact rules and our method to find the perfume of the day in 6 guesses or fewer

Game rules

Perfumdle is a daily guessing game in the spirit of Wordle. Every day at midnight, a mystery perfume is drawn from the 100 most searched perfumes in France: N°5, Sauvage, Baccarat Rouge 540, La Vie est Belle and the rest. You get 6 guesses to find it.

To guess, type a perfume or house name. Search covers all 307 perfumes in the encyclopedia. A perfume outside the 100 in the draw can never win, but it still counts as a normal guess and returns the same information.

What each guess tells you

1. Your guess is compared with the mystery perfume on 4 cells:
• House : ✓ for the same house, ✗ otherwise. There is no in-between.
• Year : ✓ for the exact year, ≈ within 5 years, ✗ beyond that. The ↑ arrow means the mystery perfume is newer, ↓ means it is older.
• Gender : ✓ for the same gender, ≈ when one of the two is unisex, ✗ for feminine against masculine.
• Family : ✓ for the same main family, ≈ when the two perfumes share a family (say a floral oriental against a woody oriental), ✗ otherwise.
2. Below the cells, a counter shows how many notes your guess shares with the mystery perfume. The shared notes are listed next to it.
3. Every miss unlocks one more clue about the mystery perfume.
4. The game ends when you find the perfume or after your sixth miss.

When the clues unlock

By your sixth guess you know the family, three notes, the decade, the gender and the house initial. A miss is never wasted. It always buys you a clue.

Practice, sharing and streak

Practice mode draws a new perfume from the 100 for every game, with no limit and never today’s answer. It does not count towards your streak. Use it to test a method.

When the game ends, the share button builds your grid in colored squares: green for exact, yellow for close, white for different. Each row also shows the number of shared notes. The perfume’s name is never included.

Your streak counts daily wins in a row. A loss resets it to zero. Skip a day and it restarts at 1 with your next win. Games and streak are saved in your browser.

Winning strategies

1. First guess: start from the free clues

You never start blind. The olfactory family and a base note are on screen before your first guess. The right move is to pick a perfume from that family that contains that note. The Family cell turns green and the counter starts at 1 or more.

Then aim for a year close to 2011. It is the median year of the draw: about half of the 100 perfumes came out before it, half after. 77 of them date from 2000 or later, so opening with a 1925 classic teaches you very little.

For gender, avoid a unisex opener. Against a feminine or masculine mystery, a unisex guess returns ≈ without telling you which. A feminine or masculine guess always settles it: ✓, ≈ (unisex mystery) or ✗ (the other one).

House has no "close" state. Dior (11 perfumes in the draw), Chanel (8) and Giorgio Armani (7) are the best bets when two candidates look equal.

Our opening guesses by starting family:

The average is computed against the perfumes of the draw with the same main family. These openers are in the draw themselves, so they can win on the first try. If the given base note is missing from them, pick a neighbor that has it.

2. Work the shared notes

This is the richest clue in the game. The list tells you which notes of your guess are in the mystery. Keep them in your next guess and look for a perfume that adds more.

At 0 shared notes, change style completely: from a powdery floral to an amber woody, from citrus to vanilla. At 4 notes or more, you are in the right neighborhood. Stay in the same family and era.

Not all notes are equal. The most frequent ones in the draw are Jasmine, Musk, Bergamot, Vanilla, Rose. Sharing them tells you little. A rare shared note (oud, iris, praline) narrows the list far more.

A perfume outside the draw can work as a probe. Lippizan by Parfums de Marly lists 18 notes. It cannot win, but it tests a lot of them at once. Keep it for your second or third guess, when the counter stays low.

3. Use the year arrow

The ↑ arrow means the mystery is newer than your guess, ↓ means it is older. With ≈ the gap is 5 years at most, which leaves 11 possible years.

Combine the arrows. A ↑ on a 2005 perfume then a ↓ on a 2019 one lock the mystery between 2006 and 2018. From your second miss, the decade shows up as a clue and tightens the range further.

The 100 perfumes of the draw by period:

4. Read the ≈ on gender and family

A ≈ on gender means one of the two perfumes is unisex. If you guessed a feminine, the mystery is unisex. If you guessed a unisex, the mystery is feminine or masculine.

A ≈ on family means the two perfumes share a family but not the same main one. Since the main family is given from the start, aim for it directly. This ≈ only matters when you pick another family on purpose to test its notes.

Advanced tips

Use the process of elimination

After 3 guesses, take stock of what you know:

• Houses ruled out by a ✗
• The year range between your ↑ and ↓ arrows
• The gender, shown after your third miss at the latest
• The confirmed notes. A note of your guess missing from the list is not in the mystery (the list shows 5 notes at most).

Know the 100 perfumes in the draw

The mystery always comes from the same pool. Over a 100-day cycle, each perfume comes up only once. The big names are bound to show up:

• Before 1950 : Miss Dior, N°5, Shalimar
• 1950 to 1979 : Eau Sauvage, Habit Rouge, Azzaro Pour Homme
• 1980 to 1999 : Acqua di Gio, Hypnotic Poison, J'adore
• 2000 to 2009 : Coco Mademoiselle, La Nuit de l'Homme, La Petite Robe Noire
• 2010 onwards : La Vie Est Belle, Bleu de Chanel, Baccarat Rouge 540

Plan your 6 guesses

• Guess 1: starting family and base note, a year near 2011, a clear gender.
• Guesses 2 and 3: keep the shared notes, follow the arrow, switch house after a ✗.
• Guesses 4 and 5: decade and gender are known and a top note arrives. Go for one specific perfume.
• Guess 6: the house initial and a blurred bottle. Run through the houses starting with that letter.

The draw in numbers

You can guess any of the 307 perfumes in the encyclopedia, but the mystery always comes from these 100.

Learn more