Which grade did you buy — alpha-terpineol has five, and three of them are not numbers

About 4 minutes.

Last time I measured how wide the assay range is. This article steps one level upstream: before that range, you already chose a grade.

Hardly anyone fills this field in

The formulations field records commercial preparation and grades. Of the 42,225 records, 726 have content — 1.7%. Of those, 337 have ten or more suppliers.

So what this article can say is limited, and the limit is itself the point: for most materials, this database carries no grade information at all.

Where it is filled in, it is about grades

The commonest grade names:

Grade name	Records
technical	152
FCC (Food Chemicals Codex)	58
CP (chemically pure)	29
USP (US Pharmacopeia)	22
reagent	18
NF (National Formulary)	17
commercial	14
pure	10

And 65 records list four or more grades.

Three you might actually use

Alpha-terpineol (103 suppliers)

grades: technical; perfumery; extra; prime; food chemical codex terpineol

Five grades, and three of them — perfumery, extra, prime — are not numbers.

"Extra" and "prime" are trade grading words. They indicate the seller considers this lot better, and no published definition says better in what respect or by how much.

Butyric acid (75 suppliers)

grades: 90%; 95%; 99%; edible; synthetic; reagent; technical; FCC

Eight grades, on two different axes. The first three are purity numbers; the last five are use or production categories. "Synthetic" and "99%" are not the same kind of information — a synthetic butyric acid can be 90% or 99%.

Ethanol (41 suppliers)

grades: USP (95% by vol); absolute; pure; completely denatured; specially denatured; industrial, various proofs

Seven grades — and "completely denatured" versus "specially denatured" describes which denaturant was added, a dimension unrelated to purity that decides whether you can use it in a perfume at all. (Ethanol strength itself is 190 proof versus 200 proof.)

Grade names come in three kinds

Sorting those 726 records' grade names gives three kinds, and they carry very different amounts of information:

Kind	Examples	What you get
1. A purity number	90%, 95%, 99%, 98+%	A number you can verify
2. A published standard	USP, NF, FCC, CP	A specification you can look up
3. A trade word	technical, extra, prime, perfumery, commercial	The seller's own grading

The third kind is the commonest — "technical" alone appears 152 times, more than any single entry in the first two kinds.

And the third kind has no shared definition. One supplier's "technical" is not guaranteed to be another's, because the word means "a grade not intended for pharmaceutical or food use", and its lower bound is set by the seller.

Most of those 726 are not fragrance materials

To be straight about it: the records listing the most grades are inorganic salts and reagents — potassium hydroxide with ten, sodium nitrate nine, potassium carbonate nine, sodium hydroxide eight.

This database covers more than fragrance, and the formulations field is filled in mostly at the chemicals end. Among aroma materials, the better-filled entries are molecules that are also industrial feedstocks — ethanol, ethyl acetate, butyric acid — while pure aroma molecules are usually blank.

So "most fragrance materials have no grade information" is a conclusion about field coverage, not about the market. Sellers certainly have grades; this database has not recorded them.

What to do

• Ask which grade, not only what purity, before ordering. They are separate questions.
• When you see extra, prime, perfumery or technical, ask what number it corresponds to. Those words carry no information on their own.
• USP, NF and FCC are lookupable. Seeing them at least tells you where to check the specification.
• For ethanol, ask about the denaturant, not just the strength.
• Re-evaluate when you change grade of the same material, for the same reason as changing extraction.
• When formulations has content, read it. Coverage is 1.7%, but where it is filled in it often states exactly what you need — camphene only made sense because of this field.

What this doesn't establish

• This is a field audit with 1.7% coverage. The 98.3% without grade information do not thereby lack grades.
• "Three kinds of grade name" is my classification; no such field exists.
• The grade-name counts come from string matching (splitting after grades:), so other phrasings are missed or mis-split.
• I did not look up the actual USP, NF or FCC specification for any material. This article only notes that those abbreviations point at a lookupable document.
• "One supplier's technical need not equal another's" is a property of the word, not the result of comparing supplier specification sheets.
• Most of the 65 records listing four or more grades are inorganic chemicals. The fragrance sample is much smaller than that figure.