Black
Black opens with a sharp, resinous combination of Somali olibanum and Madagascan black pepper—incense that does not read as warm or ceremonial but as something acrid and high-contrast.
The scent fingerprint
Weighted by intensity across 12 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.
- Leather80
- Warm Spicy60
- Earthy60
- Fresh
The note pyramid
- Incense
- Black Pepper
- Liquorice
- Leather
- Birch Tar
- Pepperwood
By the editors · 2 min readBlack opens with a sharp, resinous combination of Somali olibanum and Madagascan black pepper—incense that does not read as warm or ceremonial but as something acrid and high-contrast. The opening cuts cleanly.
Leather arrives in the heart alongside birch tar and a persistent liquorice note—a combination that pushes the fragrance into dark, medicinal territory. Pepperwood (Zanthoxylum clava-herculis) adds a distinctive woody-peppery tonality unlike standard black pepper, slightly numbing and strange.
Cedar and Haitian vetiver provide the foundation: clean, linear, and dry. Black wears close to skin; projection is intentionally restrained. Antoine Maisondieu built this as a study in severity, stripping away warmth and sweetness in equal measure. A cold-weather fragrance that rewards proximity.
Scent twins
In this family
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.
