Day 11 by Kilian: Liaisons Dangereuses, mon amour...

Saving the best for last. My 11-day quest with By Kilian has come to an end. My relationship with this perfume house though, no... never. J'adore. The black, the creation without compromise, the elegance, the dance between sweetness and darkness. In my ideal olfactory world everyone would one a Kilian fragrance and they are so diverse, even if with a clear concept, that I really think anyone could find a favorite here.

So for my grand finale I chose my first love. Liaisons Dangereuses - typical me. This fragrance was my first encounter with this brand and I almost missed a flight from Amsterdam because of it. It would have been worth it. I love this fragrance. When I experienced it for the first time about a year and a half ago I was infatuated. It is sweet but with integrity, easy bit sophisticated. It is like a floral but so fierce. I never wear florals, to me this is one even though if you look at the notes..it's really not. And it so very very romantic in the word's most dignified, playful and urban sense. To the formula.

I am in awe of this creation by Calice Becker. This is one of the most beautiful fragrances I know of. And I have seen it blend perfectly with different people that normally would not choose the same perfume. So I recommend it to anyone. I have never experienced it on a man though, so that thought makes me curious. I have a notion that the musk would create something interesting when blended with a man's body odour.

My conclusion after these 11 days is that I have found two new fragrance loves. I have also found in two other ones very nice scents for people that I love. And if possible my admiration for Kilian creations is even bigger.

Try it. Kilian's olfactory world is a great way to travel.

Kilian Day 10: The Devil attracts you with honey and sugar

Being a copywriter I give more than a little attention to the names of fragrances and I have a profound allergy to clichés or arbitrariness. So this...baam. I would buy it just for the name maybe. You have to agree with me that the name is outstanding. So let's not perform a semantic dissection on it. Let's just embrace it. Sweet Redemption - The End.

For obvious reasons I should have taken this one as the last fragrance of my Kilian-process, right? But I am also allergic to over-ordering things so, no. I have one left now. Over to the fragrance. It is very unusual. Definitely a very sweet very dark. For some reason unfortunately you cannot find the formula on Kilians web as with the other fragrances so I have searched for other sources of information. According to Basenotes, the top notes are bergamot and bitter-orange leaf, middle notes are orange blossom, myrrh and frankincense and base notes are opoponax, benzoin and vanilla. 

My feeling wearing the fragrance is that the orange and frankincense are dominating. It is very sweet even if a dark kind of sweet and also a bit powdery, like the perfumes from the 1920's. The sillage is very strong so you can't really wear it on a low key day...

When this fragranced was recently launched it was indeed the last (10th) fragrance of the L'Oeuvre Noir line. In this article Kilian Hennessy describes the inspiration for Sweet Redemption - The End, "What came to mind was Goethe’s Faust. He already has a great deal, but he wants more. He accepts the Devil’s deal. The Devil attracts you with honey and sugar. Sweet Redemption, the top notes, had to present this battle of good and evil.”

The nose behind the fragrance is Calice Becker, who has created the majority of the fragrances of L'Oeuvre Noir. She describes the creation as "love without sexual tension".

Kilian Day 9: Confusion

"A tobacco aroma with sweet undertones of honey. A pure aphrodisiac". This is how today's fragrance is described by Kilian. And Kilian's perfumers know their stuff so I am sure this potion has caused more than one baby in its lifetime. For me...no. Unfortunately. I would love to love tobacco and honey. I want to love every Kilian fragrance because the ones that I do love I am completely enchanted by. And I know enough to know that every black bottle with this name has been created with great passion and dedication. Also I am interested in all sorts of connections between the olfactorial world and the emotional world. So I am sorry to say, "Back to Black: aphrodisiac....our paths will never cross again".

The first two hours I was intrigued by this perfume. I felt like I smelled like a male rock star. Crude, restless, eager, fierce. I did however not feel like that rock star, but like I had borrowed Mick Jaggers perfume. A bit weird but interesting! However the fierceness disappeared and turned into something more like heavy incense at Midnight Mass. Bit too much of it for me, I couldn't carry it off, but still... interesting. But then by the end of this day suddenly something entirely different emerged. To me, it resembled heavy roses and soap. I know a lot of people think that sounds beautiful but it is just not my thing. I felt like when you have not rinsed the soap away from your hands and that experience to me is really uncomfortable, just the thought of it makes my head itch. But this is personal, the people in my company did not react like this at all or even sense that sort of thing.

My reflections do not mean anything else than this, a bad match simply and I would love to hear someone else describe a contrary experience of this fragrance to me. In fact, when you google "kilian aphrodisiac review" you will find exclamations of great joy. And this, is one of the things that makes perfume so interesting.

So, please look at the notes below and if you like the sound of them look up reviews on blogs, Fragrantica etc. This could be a sensational discovery for you. And now I am going to look up the notes - which I have in fact not done before this very moment because I wanted to give you a sincere reflection without having "the right answer".