Everything you need to know about Perfumers Vault 2
iPhone and iPad from the App Store, and Android from Google Play. On a Mac with Apple silicon you can install the iPad app from the Mac App Store — it is the same iPad app, not a separate Mac version.
Download on the App Store for iPhone, iPad and Apple silicon Macs, or on Google Play for Android.
For almost everything, no. Install the app and start work — formulas, materials, categories, IFRA compliance, batches, suppliers, exports and iCloud backup all run without signing in to anything. Some of those are Professional-mode features, but that is a subscription, not an account.
Two features need one. Every PV AI feature does, and so does private sharing with another PV user. The account is free and is created with Sign in with Apple or Sign in with Google. It carries your AI usage allowance, anything PV AI remembers for you, and the PV ID other users send to.
Signing in is separate from paying. Your subscription belongs to your App Store or Google Play account, so Professional mode keeps working whether or not you are signed in. You can export a copy of your account data, or delete the account outright, from Profile inside the app.
Download the app, then:
Steps 1 to 3 work on the free Hobbyist mode. Steps 4 and 5 need a Professional subscription.
Your formulas, materials, suppliers, batches and orders live in a database on your device. We do not hold a copy. They leave the device only when you make them: an iCloud backup you start, a file or PDF you export, a QR code you generate, or a formula you hand to PV AI.
PV AI sends data to our servers, but stores none of it. Your prompt goes to our server and on to Google Cloud for processing — it may contain the formula or material you asked about, or the photo you scanned — and it is not written down on the way through. Signing in creates a small account record: your account ID, email address, display name, platform, last-seen time, subscription status and AI usage counters. PV AI can save short remembered facts to that account, and if a message is stopped by our safety filter we log a short excerpt of it.
Private sharing is the one thing that does leave a copy with us. When you send a formula, a material, a finished batch or your library to another PV user, that item is stored in our database until you or they delete it, because that is how it reaches them. Only the two of you can read it, nothing is shared unless you send it, and you can switch sharing off or block a user. How shared data is handled sets out every field it holds.
Analytics is optional. It is switched off until you answer the question at the end of onboarding, and you can change your answer in Settings at any time. Our Privacy Policy sets all of this out in full.
No. Perfumers Vault 2 ships with no materials at all — the library is yours, and it starts empty. You add records by hand; in Professional mode you can also import a list from a file, or ask PV AI to fill in details and synonyms for a material you name.
A material record can hold a great deal: odour profile and note type, allergens, CAS number, regulatory data, physical properties, safety data, synonyms, sub-materials, suppliers and PubChem structures.
In Professional mode there is also a Materials catalogue: a shared reference library you can browse by category and search by name, CAS number or odour. Nothing from it enters your library until you copy a material across, and a copied material is yours to edit.
Hobbyist mode gives you the Basic and Odor tabs on each material. Professional mode unlocks the rest — regulatory, physical properties, suppliers, synonyms, sub-materials, SDS, where-used, replacements and PubChem.
IFRA support is part of Professional mode, and no IFRA data ships with the app. You confirm once, and the app downloads IFRA's own standards overview and builds your local library from it. If the download fails, or you keep your own copy, you can import the XLS by hand instead.
Once the library is in place you get:
When IFRA publishes a new amendment, Home and your IFRA library tell you. Update adds the amendment's new standards and updates the ones it revises, and leaves the rest of your library as it is. A library from before the current complete standards is replaced instead, and the IFRA library says so before you update.
The app does the arithmetic against the standards in your library; it is not a certification service, and responsibility for your compliance stays with you.
Yes. Export is part of Professional mode:
The formula PDF asks what to include before it builds. Eight sections can each be switched on or off: key figures, the composition bar, the material tables, scientific data (CAS, chemical name, molecular formula, molecular weight and LogP per material), note balance against your targets, IFRA compliance, a cost breakdown and the formula's own notes. Your choice is remembered for the next export.
In Hobbyist mode those options show the upgrade screen instead. One thing that is not restricted: the complete database backup and restore in Settings › Maintenance works in both modes, so your data is never locked in.
Yes, in Professional mode. A supplier record holds a name, contact person, email, phone, website, address, notes and a logo, and you attach suppliers to your materials. Each material carries a stock quantity: making a batch deducts what you used and warns you if stock would go negative, and formula tables can show stock alongside each line. From there you can build a shopping cart, place an order and track it, with a link out to the carrier.
To be clear about what is not there: no low-stock alerts or reorder points, no notifications, no quote comparison and no lead-time tracking. Stock is a number you keep and the app maintains as you make batches.
For a completed batch, Professional mode assembles these documents as PDFs:
The company named on the documents comes from My Companies in Settings, which is also Professional mode.
These documents are built from the data you entered. Nothing in them is verified or certified by us, and generating them does not make a product compliant. Read them before you rely on them.
On iPhone and iPad, yes. There is a Quick Actions home-screen widget in small, medium and large sizes, and four Control Center buttons on iOS 18: Scan Bottle, Formulas, Materials and PV AI Chat. Each one opens the app straight to that screen.
Six: English, French, German, Portuguese, Turkish and Hindi. The app follows your device language and you can change it in Settings.
Yes. Private sharing hands one formula, one material, one finished batch or your whole material library to one other Perfumers Vault user. They import it into their own copy of the app. It is part of Professional mode and needs the free account.
Everyone has a PV ID, an eight-character code such as ABCD-EFGH, which you can read out, send as a link or show as a QR code. Nobody can search or browse the codes, so your ID is private until you hand it over. Send to an ID and the other person gets the item under Shared formulas, with an optional message of up to 500 characters.
There is no public gallery and no feed. A share goes to one named recipient, and the two of you are the only people who can read it. A single switch in your profile governs both directions: turned off, nobody can send to you and you cannot send either. You can also block one user and leave the switch on — the block is enforced on our server, not just hidden in the app. The app also refuses to send the same version of the same item to the same person twice.
Either side can delete a share, and it goes for both. A sender can withdraw one, which offers the recipient a button to delete the copy they imported. Because the item is stored with us until then, the privacy policy explains exactly what a share holds.
Anything another user shares with you arrives in the notifications inbox, reached from the bell on the home screen, newest first and with an unread count on the icon. Open the inbox and the count clears, along with the badge on the app icon.
If the app is already open when something arrives, a notice slides in and the inbox updates on its own — there is nothing to pull or refresh.
System notifications are separate and optional. Settings has a switch for share notifications, and the first time you turn it on your device asks permission. Decline it, or turn it off later, and sharing still works; you simply find new shares the next time you look. A notification only ever names the sender and the item, never the formula.
PV AI is the assistant built into Perfumers Vault 2. It is included with a Professional subscription. There is nothing else to buy, no key to paste in, and no second bill.
When you ask PV AI something, the request goes to our own server. The server does the work using Google Cloud's AI and sends the answer back to the app. We pay Google for that processing; you never deal with Google directly and there is nowhere in the app to enter an API key.
PV AI does not require any purchase from Google. In version 1.3 it did — you supplied your own Google API key and Google billed you — but version 2.0 replaced that. PV AI is now included in the Professional subscription — no second purchase, no key to enter, and no bill from anyone but your app store.
To use PV AI you need three things: an active Professional subscription, a free Perfumers Vault account (Sign in with Apple or Google), and a one-off acceptance of the AI privacy terms. All three are set up inside the app, in PV AI Settings.
Neither. There is no API key anywhere in the app — if you used an early version that asked for one, the app deletes it on first launch.
A Google account is not required on Apple devices: on iPhone, iPad and Mac you can sign in with Apple and never touch Google. On Android, Google sign-in is the only option, so you will need a Google account there.
All of these are Professional mode, and all of them need you to be signed in. Everything PV AI produces is a draft for you to check, not a result to use as it stands.
PV AI is in beta. The chat surfaces, the Bottle Scanner, formula generation and PV AI Settings carry a BETA badge; formula advisory and AI formula import do not yet, although the same caveat applies to everything PV AI produces. It can get things wrong. It can invent a material that does not exist, misread a bottle, misquote a restriction, or hand you a formula that would not be safe to wear.
Check anything you rely on. Verify IFRA limits against the IFRA standards themselves, and safety data against your supplier's safety data sheet — never against PV AI alone. PV AI is not a safety assessment, not regulatory advice, and not a substitute for a qualified perfumer.
Every PV AI reply has a Report button. It opens a pre-filled email to our support team containing only that response, so we can look into it. Nothing else from your chat is sent.
PV AI only ever runs when you ask it to. What goes with a request depends on what you asked for: your message and the last few turns of the conversation for chat; the contents of the formula for advisory or generation; the material name for enrichment; the photo or document for the bottle scanner and AI import.
Your conversation is not stored on our servers. The transcript is kept in your device's secure keystore, holds only the most recent messages, and is erased when you clear the chat or delete your account.
PV AI can save short memories to your account — a material you avoid, the market you sell into — so it does not have to be told twice. Memory is on by default. You can read every memory, switch memory off, and delete them one by one or all at once, in Profile.
If a message is stopped by our safety filter, a short excerpt of it is logged with your account ID so we can review it. The Privacy Policy sets out exactly what is stored and for how long.
No — fair-use limits apply. PV AI is metered by a rolling time window: currently 100 prompts in a rolling six-hour window, which is the default and which we may adjust. The app shows how many prompts you have left and when the allowance resets, on the dashboard and in your profile, and that figure is always the current one.
Requests that are blocked, or that are not about perfumery, do not count against your allowance.
There are two: Hobbyist mode, which is free and has no time limit, and Professional mode, which is a subscription. Monthly and yearly plans unlock exactly the same features — the only difference is how often you are billed.
| Feature |
Hobbyist
FREE
|
PRO
PAID
|
|---|---|---|
| Formula creation, editing and note-type grouping | ||
| Your own material records (Basic and Odor tabs) | ||
| Categories | ||
| Complete database backup and restore | ||
| iCloud backup and restore (iPhone, iPad, Mac) | ||
| Full material records — regulatory, physical properties, suppliers, synonyms, sub-materials, SDS, PubChem | ||
| IFRA library, compliance analysis and IFRA documents | ||
| Formula scaling, batch making and completed batches | ||
| Formula comparison, revisions and history | ||
| Suppliers, stock, shopping cart and order tracking | ||
| Export to PDF, JSON and CSV, and QR codes | ||
| Batch compliance document package and My Companies | ||
| Biometric app lock | ||
| PV AI (beta) — chat, formula advisory, formula generation, Bottle Scanner, AI import |
About Professional mode:
Sometimes. Apple and Google configure trial offers separately, per store and per country, and either can change one at any time, so we do not print a fixed answer here. The subscribe screen in the app reads the current offer live from your store and shows it before you confirm.
If a trial is offered to you, it gives you all of Professional mode: the IFRA library and compliance analysis, batch making, exports, QR codes, the compliance document package and PV AI. PV AI still needs you to sign in, and the same fair-use limits and beta caveats apply.
The subscribe screen in the app is the authority: it reads the offer live from the store and only shows a trial if your store account is still eligible for one. A trial you do not cancel becomes a paid subscription at the price shown, so cancel at least 24 hours before it ends if you do not want to continue.
Yes. Where you cancel depends on where you bought it:
Cancel at least 24 hours before the period ends to avoid the next renewal. You keep Professional mode until the end of the period you have paid for, and after that the app returns to Hobbyist mode with all of your data intact — nothing is deleted when a subscription lapses.
The store listing always shows the exact minimum for the release you are about to install, so check there if you are on an older device.
Three ways. The first two work in both modes; the third is Professional mode only, and the first is Apple devices only:
This is backup and restore, not sync. Nothing is copied between your devices automatically, and no backup happens on a schedule — you have to tap the button. Back up before major app updates, and before you delete the app. The iCloud storage is yours: we cannot read it.
Your formulas and materials are on your device, so deleting the app removes them — back up first if you want to keep them.
If you created an account for PV AI, go to Profile › Delete account in the app. You will be asked to sign in again first, because it is a permanent action. It deletes your sign-in, your account record, every PV AI memory and the safety logs held against you, and erases the chat transcript from your device.
Deleting your account does not cancel your subscription — that belongs to your App Store or Google Play account and has to be cancelled there. Three small records are also kept on purpose: a note that the account ID was deleted, so late messages cannot recreate it; an anti-abuse counter held under a one-way hash, so that deleting an account cannot be used to reset AI limits; and your subscriber record with RevenueCat, the service that manages subscriptions for us. None of them holds anything you wrote. See What we keep, and why.
Step-by-step instructions are on the account deletion page, and the Privacy Policy explains what is kept and why.
