Pure Oud and Back to Black By Kilian: Olfactory Velvet

And now... back to perfumes, to breathe in a little beauty!

How annoying is it that in the newest things I’ve sniffed, two of the bottles that have my name on them should happen to be By Kilian, i.e. eat-pasta-for-a-month expensive, and what’s more, that one of the two isn’t even out until September? I see a lot of trips to the BK stand to get spritzed with the under-the-counter testers in my future…

I’ve always been seduced by the concept of oud – more for its reputation for being dark and a bit of an acquired taste than for its rarity and price – but the rough ride of the Montales sends me shrieking for my smelling salts and I haven’t yet worked up the courage to take on Arabian ouds and with them, the whole of Middle-eastern perfumery (though that day will come).

Pure Oud, now, that’s another story. It certainly smells like it ought to be the real stuff: smooth, velvety, barely sweetened by almond, warmed with a touch of tobacco by immortelle, dragged a little further into leather by a smidge of inky castoreum and, oh, yessssssssss: civet. This is the dark, musty lair of a sleek-furred beast, with metallic saffron alluding to the blood of the prey. It’s purring, though.

Back to Black/ Aphrodisiac has the same smooth, velvety feel but in a more glowing tone: a tobacco gourmand, perhaps remotely inspired by Tabac Blond but very close to the apple and honey flavored tobacco used in narguilehs, like the one I smoked in a seaside café in Alexandria thinking of Lawrence Durrell (whom I was to meet two weeks later in the South of France). On my skin, Back to Black exhales a slightly over-ripe fruitiness and boozy amaretto warmth before yielding to beeswax, cured tobacco leaves on an oak moss bed, and a floral wisp which is probably the honey. On the young male S.A.’s skin, however, Back to Black smells of apples (though the notes say raspberry) and much more strongly of honey; a second male tester brings the tobacco – rich, Casa del Habano humidor tobacco – to the fore on a vetiver-patchouli base. During the time I spent at the By Kilian counter, I saw no less than three women get sprayed and swoon… Back to Black is delectable, rich, and, yes, probably deserving of its “aphrodisiac” label. It soaks into skin as though you’d spent a lazy winter afternoon in a wooden yali by the Bosphorus, bathed in the fragrant smoke of the hookah. Baudelaire would’ve approved.

Image: Jean-Léon Gérôme, Odalisque