Samouraï
A 1990s Franco-Japanese masculine classic.
Samourai began in 1995 as a single eau de toilette within Parfums Alain Delon, named after Jean-Pierre Melville's 1967 film Le Samourai in which Delon plays a laconic Parisian hitman. The original juice is a woody-aromatic men's fragrance built on pink pepper, bergamot, jasmine, rose and cedar, and it found a particularly devoted audience in Japan, where Samourai has long been one of the best-selling masculine fragrances at department-store and drugstore counters. The Alain Delon perfume business has since been folded into the Swiss Lalique Group, which now manages Samourai as a standalone brand alongside its sister labels. Flankers such as Samourai Light, Samourai Woman and the more recent Samourai Katana and Samourai 47 have extended the line in both directions, but the original remains the anchor. Pricing is firmly accessible, and the house's identity is essentially that of a 1990s Franco-Japanese masculine classic kept gently in motion.
DNA over time
Each column is an era. Each colored band shows that family’s share of accord weight across every perfume the house released in that window. Bigger band = the house leaned harder on that family.
