Series 3: Incense - Kyoto
Kyoto was designed as a meditation on Buddhist and Shinto spiritual practice, and Bertrand Duchaufour's dedication to incense as both structure and subject is complete.
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.
- Smoky85
- Soft Spicy50
- Green50
- Earthy
The note pyramid
- Incense
- Immortelle
- Vetiver
- Cypress
- Amber
- Cedar
- Patchouli
- Teak Wood
- Coffee
By the editors · 2 min readKyoto was designed as a meditation on Buddhist and Shinto spiritual practice, and Bertrand Duchaufour's dedication to incense as both structure and subject is complete. He built the fragrance around a dry, woody incense smoke — cedar-inflected rather than heavy — with cypress providing the distinctly Japanese quality of green conifer in winter light. Immortelle contributes a brief herbal sweetness; coffee emerges alongside patchouli and vetiver as an unexpected bridge between the sacred and the contemplative.
Teak wood gives the drydown its particular dry-timber character. Austere, precise, and genuinely transportive — one of the finest fragrance tributes to a specific place.
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.
