Imari (Original) 1985
Imari opens with a sharp green jolt—galbanum over bergamot—that immediately signals its eighties origins.
The scent fingerprint
Weighted by intensity across 14 accords.
Every perfume in Sillage is represented as a distribution across canonical accord slugs — a lingua franca for scent. Two fragrances with overlapping fingerprints are scent-twins, even if they share no literal note.
- Fresh50
- Aromatic50
- White Floral50
- Iris
The note pyramid
- Galbanum
- Bergamot
- Tuberose
- Ylang-Ylang
- Lily of the Valley
By the editors · 2 min readImari opens with a sharp green jolt—galbanum over bergamot—that immediately signals its eighties origins. There's nothing soft about the entrance. Within minutes, the florals arrive in full force: tuberose and ylang-ylang rendered in broad, unapologetic strokes, with lily of the valley providing a fleeting coolness before the composition turns warmer and louder.
The drydown settles into a sweet amber-vanilla base reinforced by sandalwood and musk, the kind of plush, enveloping finish that defined department store orientals of the era. Cedar adds structure without forestalling the sweetness. This is a perfume built for presence, not subtlety—bold, heavily blended, and unashamedly synthetic in the way many mass-market florientals of its decade were. It wears like a time capsule, capturing a particular vision of feminine glamour that has since fallen out of fashion but remains distinctive for those who remember it.
Scent twins
Factual metadata (name, house, year, notes) is seeded from public datasets. The editorial reading and scent fingerprint are written by Claude against our house style — none of it is scraped prose. Read our methodology.
