The online database, updated weekly, archives profiles of over 17,000 perfumes, listing brand name, corporate group, creative director, gender, perfumer, date, country of origin, bottle designer, fragrance family, an image, an olfactory pyramid and a pronunciation guide.

If a mass-market perfume is discontinued, it remains listed in the guide for another two years, excluding fragrances deemed to be of outstanding influence, which are therefore maintained.

[3] In 1984, Michael Edwards, having left Halston as international marketing director, was aware of the need for a guide to help retailers suggest perfumes to consumers.

Though Edwards had previously tried to re-establish Firmenich’s defunct classification Bouquet de la Parfumerie, the leading manual remained Haarmann & Reimer’s Guide to Fragrance Ingredients, an essentially technical genealogy unsuited to retail.

Due to its weekly updates and comprehensive scope (profiling over 17,000 perfumes in 2015), the database has largely superseded the guide's printed edition.

Its simplistic categories, largely devised for retail, differ from the complex subgroups featured in smaller technical manuals such as the Classification officielle des parfums et terminologie (also created in 1984), published by the French Society of Perfumers.[how?]