Who wrote the odour field — a quarter of the 8,298 odour descriptions carry one of two names

About 5 minutes.

Every material guide in this series quotes the odour field. Somewhere past the hundredth article I noticed a question I had never asked:

Who wrote those words?

Two names

The odor_descriptions field carries more than adjectives — it often carries an attribution. Sweeping the database:

• Records with an odour description: 8,298
• Luebke, William: appears on 1,712 (20.6%)
• Mosciano, Gerard: appears on 928 (11.2%)
• Both: 538 (6.5%)
• At least one of the two: 2,102 (25.3%)

A quarter.

The remaining 6,196 (74.7%) are mostly supplier copy — a different kind of thing, whose inconsistency I dealt with in The supplier calls it "very faint".

Two spans of different length

The years in the attributions show two different working periods:

	Records	Year range	Densest years
Luebke	1,712	1981–2021	1985–1989
Mosciano	928	1989–2001	1990–1994

Mosciano's descriptions stop in 2001 — so of those 928, even the newest is 25 years old. Luebke's span four decades.

That does not make older descriptions wrong. But it means two passages sitting side by side on one page may be twenty years apart, written in different decades' vocabulary habits.

The real difference is whether a concentration is stated

This was the result I did not expect, and it matters far more than which description is more accurate.

I split out each passage by each author and checked whether it states "at X%" and "in what":

	Passages	States concentration	States solvent
Luebke	1,719	99.2%	36.9%
Mosciano	928	26.2%	1.3%

Luebke states a concentration in almost every passage; Mosciano in a quarter of them.

The solvent gap is wider still: 37% against 1.3%.

This decides whether a description can be redone. "At 10% in dipropylene glycol it smells sweet and balsamic" is a repeatable statement; "sweet and balsamic" is not, because neat and 1% are different things — which I measured in Is my orris butter ruined.

A case that resolves: WS-3

WS-3 is a cooling agent with 36 suppliers. Both describers left a passage on its record, and at first glance they contradict:

Luebke (2009): at 25.00% in dipropylene glycol. mild mentholic minty.

Mosciano (2000): at 10.00%. Virtually odorless being slightly alcoholic and cooling.

One says minty, one says virtually odourless.

But read the concentrations and the contradiction shrinks: 25% against 10%, a 2.5-fold difference. For a material with a vapour pressure of 0.000085 mmHg and a strength field reading "low", a gap between "virtually odourless" and "mild mentholic" across that range is entirely plausible.

This looks less like two opinions and more like two doses of the same thing. (The material itself has its own material guide.)

A case that does not resolve: ambroxan

The same move fails on ambroxan:

Luebke (1987): at 1.00% in dipropylene glycol. ambergris old paper sweet labdanum dry.

Mosciano (1991): Woody, pine, cedar-like with a green seedy and tea-like nuance.

The two passages share no word. One is ambergris and old paper; the other is pine and tea.

And this time concentration cannot explain it, because Mosciano's passage does not state one.

I do not know at what strength he smelled it, or in what. So the two passages cannot be compared — which is different from one of them being wrong.

(Incidentally, ten supplier passages sit below those two on the same record, most saying "amber, woody, musk". That is a third voice, and it has a commercial motive.)

What this means for reading the database

• When you meet an odour description, look for the "at X% in Y" prefix. With it, the passage can be redone. Without it, it is one person's impression at an unknown dose.
• Do not treat two descriptions as votes. They may differ in concentration, decade and solvent.
• Supplier copy is a third category; read it separately. No attribution, no concentration, and a commercial motive.
• Two descriptions of one material sharing no vocabulary does not mean someone is wrong. Establish whether they are comparable first.
• I hold myself to this too. When this series quotes an odour field, if the passage states a concentration I quote the concentration with it. If it does not, that is a limit on my quotation, not a property of the material.

What this doesn't establish

• I did not research who these two are, their evaluation method or their training. This article handles only what the field preserves: names, years, concentrations, solvents.
• The attribution match is string matching. The same person writing their name differently would be missed, so 20.6% and 11.2% are lower bounds.
• "States a concentration" was found by regex for the at N % form. Concentrations expressed another way count as absent.
• "No concentration means not comparable" is my criterion, not their error. A magazine column and a database field have different conventions, and a P&F column need not state a concentration each time.
• Years come from the parentheses in the attribution, which is a publication or indexing year, not necessarily the year of evaluation.
• I did not classify the 74.7% carrying neither name. That set mixes supplier copy, unattributed descriptions and possibly other sources.
• This article evaluates no description's accuracy. I have smelled none of these materials.