Back to Black by By Kilian bottle
By Kilian

Back to Black

4.0/5 · 6,340 votes Unisex 2009
Main accords
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Fragrance notes

Notes

Character

Longevity3.9/5
Sillage3.2/5
Day42
Night95
Winter100
Fall86
Spring24
Summer13
Our take

White honey and cherry open thick and boozy, almost like a liqueur, with raspberry adding a tart edge right alongside the sweetness.

Tobacco shows up early too, giving the fruit a dry, bitter counterpoint, and almond with gingerbread add a warm, spiced sweetness without turning the opening into something purely sugary. Calice Becker composed it in 2009.

The base is dense: tonka bean, amber, benzoin, and French labdanum build a resinous, warm foundation, while saffron, cardamom, and coriander add spice, and oak with Virginia cedar bring in a dry woodiness. It hangs on well past the point where the top notes give out, settling into something darker and drier, and the sillage forms a modest warmth that stays near the body, cherry and tobacco lingering longest of anything here.

This is unmistakably a cold-weather fragrance, built for fall and winter nights over daytime wear, dark and a little decadent. The tobacco and dry spice give the sweetness a bitter, resinous edge, a gourmand oriental with enough weight to avoid feeling like straightforward candy, geranium and chamomile barely visible under everything else going on.

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