I Made a Chrome Extension to Find Your Next Fragrance
Sometimes you can just do things in life.
With the help of AI, so many silly little concepts can become a reality so fast and easy!
Unlocking core memories + new hobby
Throughout my life, I have always enjoyed fragrances. From earliest memories of how my mother would smell for a fancy night out and how my father’s cologne would smell when I took the cap off. Those were special memories for me. Scent is one of those senses that can instantly bring back to a place and time.
Over the past few years, I have started to get more into the fragrance world. It’s always fun diving head first into a niche because you rapidly learn that there is a lot of knowledge out there and you know very little.
More of a recent phenomenon in the industry has been the rapid rise of “dupe” fragrances. Also known as clones, these perfumes are meant to be replicas of the ones from the major fragrance houses. They typically smell about 80+% similar, but cost only a fraction of the money.
While clones are awesome, it can be hard to keep track of what fragrance a clone is trying to duplicate. That’s where this idea came from!
Let’s make an app!
So I built a chrome extension to help with this problem. The way it works is that the extension will scan the webpage you are on and if it sees a matching name of a dupe fragrance, then it will highlight it. When you hover over the highlighted name you get a dialogue box that gives you the name of the original fragrance that it is replicating.
The engine behind this right now is a Google Sheet database, which makes things easier for me right now to add new fragrances.
Looking ahead
The simplest next step is to publish the app and make it available to everyone. Before doing that, I want to make some additional improvements. For example, every website has it’s own code that needs to be read by the extension. What that means for me is I need to have the extension coded to work for every specific site I wish for people to use it on. Perhaps there is a better way, but so far this looks to be a necessary evil.
I also want to add more quality of life features such as listing out fragrance notes on the popup. I could also make a list similar fragrances too - so say you like a certain dupe, you can hover over it and see other dupes alongside it to try.
There’s so many possibilities with this idea.
The biggest hurdle so far has been gathering all of the data. The biggest player in this space has been Fragrantica.com. The issue is that they are notoriously strict on not allowing scraping of their data and will go after people that do take their information. I’m not someone to play with fire, so I have had to resort to other means to gather information. This is one aspect where I think AI could help me come up with a creative solution through web scraping other datasources on the internet.
Overall, I love these little side projects! It’s a blast creating something from scratch and seeing your idea come to life. I get to use parts of my brain I don’t necessarily get to use during my 9-5. I also get to build stuff that I want to use myself!
