Methodology.
How Sillage is assembled — where our data comes from, what the computer wrote, and what the humans wrote. If you’re skeptical of either, good; so are we.
Factual catalog
Perfume names, houses, release years, and published note lists are sourced from public datasets — primarily Kaggle-indexed dumps of community fragrance databases. These are factual metadata: not copyrightable, not anyone’s creative expression.
We do not reproduce scraped prose. Reviews, editorial paragraphs, and “house description” blurbs from other sites are never shown on Sillage — they would be someone else’s voice, and we only publish in ours.
Written by the editors (us)
Hand-written copy — the hooks on the home page, editorial lists, curator’s notes — is written by the Sillage editorial team. When a real person wrote it, you’ll see “By the editors” or a named byline. When we make mistakes, we correct them in place.
Written by Claude
Three things on every perfume page are generated by Anthropic’s Claude against our house style guide:
- The editorial reading — a 90–120 word first-principles description written from the note pyramid and house context.
- The scent fingerprint — normalized weights across our 35 canonical accords, plus longevity, sillage, complexity, and skin-scent estimates.
- Scent twins — short explanations of why two perfumes share a fingerprint.
None of it is prompted to sound like any real critic. You’ll see tasteful disclosures next to every AI-generated surface, and the model name is included in our provenance log for anyone auditing the site.
Embeddings (the 1024-dimensional vectors that power our semantic search and twin-finder) come from Voyage AI’s voyage-3-large.
What we don't do
No banner ads. No auto-play video. No interstitials. Ever.
No fake reviews, no bought reviews, and no synthetic user testimonials. When we launched this site publicly, the first hundred reviews were hand-written by real wearers during an invite-only beta.
No counterfeit-friendly retailer links. The “Where to buy” panel only lists authorised retailers and vetted decant services, each with a trust flag.
Takedown
If you’re a house, perfumer, or rights-holder and something on Sillage misrepresents you or your product, email methodology@sillage.art with the URL and your concern.
We respond within 72 hours. Items marked for takedown are hidden immediately while we review, and removed permanently if the claim stands. The site has a status: removedlifecycle step built into the data model from day one — it’s a first-class citizen, not a bolt-on.
We also accept factual corrections from readers. Every perfume page has a Suggest an edit link in the footer.