Hermessence Vetiver Tonka Hermès
The opening feels almost spartan—a bright, mineral vetiver that skips floral sweetness entirely and heads straight for the root's earthy, slightly bitter character.
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.
- Earthy80
- Sweet55
- Aromatic50
- Warm Spicy
By the editors · 2 min readThe opening feels almost spartan—a bright, mineral vetiver that skips floral sweetness entirely and heads straight for the root's earthy, slightly bitter character. There's a citric clarity in the first minutes, as if the composition has been stripped back to reveal only what's essential.
As it settles, tonka arrives not as gourmand comfort but as a restraining hand, its almond-like warmth smoothing vetiver's sharper edges without sweetening the core. The effect is poised, almost austere—less about luxury as display and more about quiet materials handled with precision. It wears close and linear, never shouting.
This suits someone who prefers understatement, who values materials over spectacle. It's vetiver for those who find most vetivers either too green or too sweet, stripped to a cleaner, more architectural idea of the note itself.
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.
