Cardinal
Cardinal opens with an assertive crack of black and pink pepper — a terse, almost military intro — before incense takes command entirely.
The scent fingerprint
Weighted by intensity across 11 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.
- Smoky95
- Warm Spicy60
- Earthy60
- Fresh
The note pyramid
- Black Pepper
- Pink Pepper
- Myrrh
- Frankincense
- Labdanum
By the editors · 2 min readCardinal opens with an assertive crack of black and pink pepper — a terse, almost military intro — before incense takes command entirely. Frankincense and myrrh intertwine in the classical church accord: cold stone, billowing smoke, the particular stillness of high vaulted spaces. The myrrh carries a sticky resinousness without ever softening into sweetness; the frankincense stays spare, medicinal-edged. In the dry-down, ambergris breathes a marine warmth into the smoke while vetiver and patchouli give it earth and shadow. Labdanum binds everything with a dark, beeswax-like persistence.
Cardinal has nothing decorative about it — no fruits, no flowers, no apology. It wears like a conviction. Suited to someone who appreciates quiet formality or wants an incense that doesn't perform.
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.
