Halston Z14
Z-14 opens with an unusual bright-green thrust: basil and citrus cutting through a creamy gardenia haze.
The scent fingerprint
Weighted by intensity across 16 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.
- Mossy75
- Herbal65
- Patchouli65
- Leather
The note pyramid
- Gardenia
- Basil
- Lemon
- Bergamot
- Cinnamon
- Vetiver
- Jasmine
By the editors · 2 min readZ-14 opens with an unusual bright-green thrust: basil and citrus cutting through a creamy gardenia haze. The effect is bracing but not sharp, like stepping into a greenhouse where someone's just watered aromatic herbs. This was Halston's boldest men's fragrance, and that opening explains why—few things in 1974 started quite so vegetal.
The heart thickens quickly with cinnamon-dusted woods and a leathery patchouli that smells more like saddle soap than headshop. Vetiver and cedar provide structure, while jasmine adds a subtle sweetness that keeps the composition from turning too austere. It's masculine without being loud, complex without showing off.
The drydown settles into a mossy, ambered warmth—oakmoss and tonka giving it that classic chypre-adjacent feel that defined American designer masculines of the era. This wears like tailored suede: polished, a little unconventional, unapologetically grown-up. Best suited to someone who appreciates references but doesn't need them spelled out.
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.
