Calvin
Calvin, CK's debut fragrance from 1981, reads like an artifact of the era — herbal and earthy with a tarragon-spice backbone that would be unusually assertive by contemporary standards.
The scent fingerprint
Weighted by intensity across 13 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.
- Herbal50
- Aromatic50
- Warm Spicy50
- White Floral
The note pyramid
- Neroli
- Lemon
- Bergamot
- Cinnamon
- Tarragon
- Orange Blossom
By the editors · 2 min readCalvin, CK's debut fragrance from 1981, reads like an artifact of the era — herbal and earthy with a tarragon-spice backbone that would be unusually assertive by contemporary standards. The citrus opening — neroli, lemon, bergamot — is clean and of its time. The heart introduces the character: cinnamon and tarragon create something simultaneously sweet and biting, lifted by orange blossom.
Sandalwood, vetiver, patchouli, and musk form a substantial dry-down. It skews masculine in practice despite the original unisex positioning. It carries the density of a 1980s department store classic.
Recent coverage
- note study · On The Scent · Oct 22, 2026
Season 8, Episode 19: Dr Kate Lister – Favourite Fragrances and Scented Scandals
We couldn’t do better than quote our brilliant guest Dr Kate Lister’s own bulging bio: ‘a history sleuth with a passion for uncovering the wild tales of the past. You might know me from my bestselling books, “A Curious History of Sex” and “Harlots, Whores, and Hackabouts: A Histo
- other · Now Smell This · Aug 25, 2026
He chose his favorite, which was Fenty perfume
“He chose his favorite, which was Fenty perfume,” Spence said. “Big cats, in general, really like Obsession by Calvin Klein. You can usually tell when a big cat likes something, they rub on it. That’s their golden ticket. They use scent marking as a way to communicate, and to als
- launch · Now Smell This · Aug 13, 2026
Calvin Klein Euphoria Signature Elixir ~ new fragrance
Calvin Klein has launched Euphoria Signature Elixir, a new fragrance for women. Euphoria Signature Elixir is an addition to the Euphoria Elixir Collection, and a flanker to 2005's Euphoria...
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.
