1740 Marquis de Sade
The bergamot opening is fleeting, quickly overtaken by a dark cardamom-patchouli accord that smells simultaneously smoky and slightly medicinal.
The scent fingerprint
Weighted by intensity across 13 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.
- Leather85
- Patchouli65
- Warm Spicy55
- Herbal
The note pyramid
- Bergamot
- Patchouli
- Cardamom
- Leather
- Birch
- Vanilla
By the editors · 2 min readThe bergamot opening is fleeting, quickly overtaken by a dark cardamom-patchouli accord that smells simultaneously smoky and slightly medicinal. There's an austere quality here, as if the spice has been stripped of sweetness and left to char at the edges. Within minutes, birch tar asserts itself—sharp, leathery, unmistakably reminiscent of Russian leather fragrances but less polished.
The drydown balances this severity with Virginia cedar and a restrained vanilla that never quite softens the composition's core. The leather remains prominent throughout, not supple or animalic but more like cured hide left near a wood fire. Patchouli adds earthiness without the typical hippie-shop associations.
This is fragrance as provocation—deliberately challenging, unapologetically masculine in the classical sense. It suits those who find conventional designer scents too accommodating and prefer their perfumes to make a statement rather than a compromise.
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.
