What is it: one By Kilian refillable travel spray (as shown above) plus one unused 7.5 ml refill of the Sweet Redemption fragrance.
How do I get it: For a chance to win, leave a comment telling me that you live in the US. Also, please us either a) your favorite By Kilian fragrance or b) your favorite candy.
Be sure to use the “Post a comment” box…
Perfumes cling closely to your flesh
As incense to a censer; bright
And dusky nymph, you are all Night,
Secret and passionate and fresh!— Charles Baudelaire (trans. Jacques LeClercq)
This is the end / beautiful friend
— Jim Morrison
I’m sorry, but I couldn’t stop myself from using those images and quotations. What else can one do, when faced with promotional copy stating that a fragrance is “inspired on one hand by Baudelaire’s homage to sweet and deep fragrances, yet on the other hand by the dark and mysterious poetry of Jim Morrison as he seemingly forebode his own demise”? The fragrance in question is Sweet Redemption (The End), the tenth and final release in By Kilian’s L’Oeuvre Noire series. It was developed by perfumer Calice Becker and the notes for this sweet powdery woods fragrance include orange blossom, vanilla, myrrh, opopanax, benzoin and incense.
Overwrought prose aside, what do we have here? Sweet Redemption opens with a top note of orange blossom cocooned in spun sugar. It’s feminine and quite pretty, and I thought for a moment that this would turn out to be one of the simpler By Kilian compositions…
A long time ago, a friend who was a painter gave me a book. I can’t tell you now what the book was about, but I remember the rich scent of his work soaked in its pages. For days, I buried my nose in the book to smell the turpentine, oil paint, and raw wood of his studio. The smell brought back the giant landscape he was working on while a cat padded over the cement floor to jump into my lap as I talked and nursed a glass of red wine. This is what I think of when I smell By Kilian Incense Oud Eau de Parfum.
Incense Oud, the third in By Kilian’s Arabian Nights series, was developed by perfumer Sidonie Lancesseur and released earlier this year. By Kilian’s website lists among its notes incense, oud, cardamom, rose, and labdanum. Probably, like many fragrances, it has something citrusy and fleeting for top notes, but I don’t smell it. And probably there’s something more complex in its body, but I don’t smell that, either.
What I do smell is a surprisingly sinuous — although definitely present — incense sweetened with sandalwood…
By Kilian will launch Sweet Redemption, the tenth and final fragrance in the Black Masterpiece / L’Oeuvre Noire collection (the full name of the perfume: Sweet Redemption by Kilian the end) that debuted in 2007 with six fragrances…
It is a testament to the ongoing deluge of new perfumes, niche and not niche, that Love and Tears (Surrender) launched last year and I promptly forgot all about it, even though it’s a jasmine soliflore, a category of perfumes that I have some interest in, and even though I apparently got a sample shortly after it launched. Love and Tears is by perfumer Calice Becker, an obvious bonus, and it’s from By Kilian, which might or might not be a bonus depending on your point of view (By Kilian makes me a little cranky, as I’ve mentioned before).1
The back story, according to Mr. Kilian Hennessy:
Only the jasmine flower, with its endless spectrum of facets — citrus, green, floral and animalistic — was able to express the profusion of emotions that I wanted to communicate with this scent: the beginning of love marked with excitement, the fear of the unknown, and, ultimately, the surrender to love!
Mostly, though, they left out the animalistic part, and arguably even the “surrender to love”, and certainly the tears. Love and Tears is, perhaps, too richly floral to be the early, innocent days of love, but it’s too easygoing to be anything like surrender…