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".

Opoponax - from monastery to Meisel

Opoponax, also known as sweet myrrh, grows in particular in Iran, Italy, Greece, Turkey and in Somalia. The herb grows one-third meter to one meter in height. A resin is extracted from the stem by making an incision. The resin is drinkable in liquid but has a bitter taste, and the odor of the fresh resin is supposedly also quite unpleasant. The resin hardens when exposed to air and creates little dried pieces, which is how it is most commonly sold. And here is where the story starts getting more olfactory interesting and pleasant: the dried resin is inflammable and if burned as incense it gives a woody balsamic smell that has been a part of spiritual ceremonies for many, many, many years.  The name opoponax, sometimes spelled opopanax, has its origin in the Ancient Greek word for vegetable juice and healing. 

Photo: getreligion.org