Sphinx puzzles are about matching the color of your equipped oil font to the color it shows. Only your leading color matters. It needs to be a similar color, but more importantly it needs the same 2 powers in the same order. How close the effect needs to be is a bit of a guessing game, but there's a bonus imp tied to getting it nearly perfect. The requested effects come from a mixture of 3 real ingredient rather than complete randomness, so you have a pretty good shot at getting it exactly right.