Cathedral
Black pepper opens alone, sharp and dry with a peppery prickle that establishes immediate seriousness.
Have an image for this perfume? Sign in to contribute →
The scent fingerprint
Weighted by intensity across 9 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.
- Smoky90
- Leather70
- Yellow Floral50
- Balsamic
The note pyramid
- Black Pepper
- Ylang-Ylang
- Narcissus
- Leather
- Frankincense
By the editors · 2 min readBlack pepper opens alone, sharp and dry with a peppery prickle that establishes immediate seriousness. There's no citrus or fruit to soften the entry — the perfume starts savory and dark.
Ylang-ylang and narcissus develop an unusual heart. Ylang's banana-creamy floral richness meets narcissus's hay-and-honey green narcotic depth. Together they read indolic and slightly soiled, an unconventional pairing that suits the perfume's name.
Leather, frankincense, labdanum, smoke, and cedar close the composition with a full incense-and-leather drydown. Frankincense brings smoky resin, labdanum adds sticky balsamic warmth, smoke makes the literal claim, and cedar provides structure. Leather grounds everything in a dark suppleness. Overall it reads as a dense smoky-leather-floral composition evoking exactly its namesake.
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.