Sillage: Scent Diary & Nose

You have ten thousand photographs and not one smell.

Smell is wired straight into memory's basement. One molecule of a stranger's perfume on a train and you are, involuntarily, in a hallway in 1998. We built whole industries for what we see and hear, and almost nothing for the sense that time travels.

Sillage is three things at once: a diary for smells, a training programme for your nose, and a record of your shelf. It is entirely offline and holds no account.

THE DIARY THAT TIME TRAVELS

An entry takes about forty seconds. What you smelled, note tags from a lexicon of 352 cards, an emotion wheel that tints the entry in the stream, the place, the people, the bottle you were wearing.

Then the part that matters: the anchor. You cannot record a smell, but you can encode one, and articulation is the encoding. The field hands you a sentence shape and asks for one line of comparison. Like wet cardboard and oranges, but warmer. Nine parts wet stone, one part hot butter.

Entries come back. On the anniversary, and on the same week of the year, so the first cold morning of autumn brings back last year's first cold morning.

TRAIN YOUR NOSE LIKE A PALATE

Thirty eight sessions across two tracks, five minutes or less each.

Foundations: fourteen sessions on four things you already own, coffee, a lemon, cloves and mint. Attention first, then description, then blind identification, then memory span.

The Pantry Conservatory: twenty four sessions across eight shelves of your own kitchen, four jars widening to eight.

You shuffle the jars and you mark yourself, because the app cannot smell anything. It says so on the screen. A miss is worth more than a hit: it is how the app knows which shelf to send you back to, and which card to put in front of you.

YOUR NOSE, CHARTED

Identification accuracy across every scored session. Vocabulary growth, the count of words you have actually used out of 352. The longest gap you have carried a smell across and still picked it out. Accuracy per shelf, and what gets past you.

YOUR SHELF, FINALLY ORGANISED

Bottles, decants and samples, with sizes, notes, seasons, a four step sillage scale and a three line take: opening, heart, drydown. One tap logs a wear.

About a fortnight later the log pays you back: reach-for rate, cost per wear, which months a bottle belongs to, and a quiet list of what has not been worn in months.

Every bottle is drawn in code from its own name and notes, so the shelf looks like a shelf without the app ever asking for your camera.

WORDS FOR WHAT YOU SMELL

352 cards across fifteen families, from the citrus grove to the animalic cellar to the vocabulary of the craft. What it is, where you meet it, what sits nearby.

Every card lists the entries and bottles where you have used it, so the lexicon is a map of your own nose rather than a glossary.

NOTHING LEAVES YOUR PHONE

Sillage does not request the internet permission, so Android will not let it open a connection at all. You can check that on this listing before you install.

No account, no sign in, no cloud, no analytics, no crash reporter, no advertising identifier. No camera permission, no photo picker, no location permission. Export everything as JSON or CSV whenever you like, or erase all of it in two taps.

WHAT SILLAGE DOES NOT DO

No batch code decoding: it needs a brand by brand database nobody outside those brands can verify, and a half correct one is worse than none. No community, shelf sharing or clubs: those need a server, and a server needs an account. No weather triggered resurfacing: entries return by anniversary and season instead. No photographs, no widgets, English only.

The training is written as a hobby, in the spirit of ear training or wine tasting. Sillage makes no medical claim. If your sense of smell has changed suddenly, that is a conversation for a doctor.

FREE AND COMPLETE

Every entry, every bottle, every session and all 352 cards. No paid tier, no subscription, no in-app purchase, no ads.

Recent changes:
A new look. Sillage now has a mark of its own: a scent trail that runs under every screen head, drawn empty states instead of apologies, and a redrawn icon in plum, magenta and gold.

Fixes: restoring a backup kept your entries but dropped which bottle each one was written in. A fast double tap on Save wrote the entry twice. A wear dated in the future broke the shelf figures. Leaving mid drill threw the round away.