Reviews of Salome 
Papillon Artisan Perfumes (2015)

A fantastic, giant jasmine… packed with so many great florals that unwind over an absolutely beastly base of moss, cumin, castoreum and hyrax.

Unique, motioning towards classic perfumery, while still singing in the very clear voice of Papillon’s style(stack this up next to Anubis and Hera to see what I mean).

Have to disagree with the review below. Nothing like Rochas Femme, really, though they both have a lot of cumin in their current form, so if you are sensitive to cumin, you might be missing the total absence of peach/prune/cinnamon that makes Femme Rochas so compelling.

If you need a classical composition to compare it to, I’d probably say Bal Al Versailles but even that is a bit of a stretch. This is a monster. But so beautiful.

Salome is Herod's step-daughter. A archetypal femme fatale, a figuere of desire and doom, embracing her own destruction. She is one of the women who dance for Herod and Herodias at a birthday celebration for Herod, who doring "The dance of the seven veils" the scent of her body combines with her animalic&erotic perfume and intoxicates every man around her, and claiming as her reward the head of John the Baptist. An bloody end...this is hot sex in a bottle, the kind of sex after a night dancing and mingling with armpits after everyone's cologne mixes with a little sweet and honey and musk and amber. Animal fur, animal waste, sweaty human body. impulsive, brutal, rude, visceral, stanky, primitive, but also strange, erotically sweaty and ahhh, orgasmic in the retro style.

It start out harsh, but wait. Be patient, gives way to sweetness, the floral notes tone it down the slightest bit which ends up being a perfect balance. A bed of cernation and the most beautiful renaissance rose. There is leather here alongside the earthy, musty patchouli. There is also a slight smokey smell like a recently extinguished candle. As it dries down you get that post-coital sexy funk-still well structured though. This fragrance is an ode to musk, leather and sex. The dry down is full of art and depth. This strikes me as being the scent of a man but a woman could definitely wear it. If you don't like leathery musky animalic scents then this one is not for you because it gets right down to dirty, sweaty sex like animals in heat. The sillage is great and the longevity is insane.

Beautiful floral opening strong in jasmine mixed with musk. Sort of the same opening feel as Kiehls, but they depart pretty quickly. There is much more going on here, and at a much deeper level. The heart is a gorgeous birch tar castoreum leather feel, a bit smoky, and just really deep, and a bit dark, like a hazy dark tan color. Really something i have not run across much. It has a timeless beauty to it. It left an oil sheen where i applied it. Really just smells of high quality. Makes me want to check out other things they've done, that type of quality. Thumbs up.

Cognac-like, booze infused jasmine. Cold, stony note. Mossy oak. Mountain earth. Hints of bitter orange. Rich, thick patchouli and styrax. Rich too, are animalics, in an under-layer.

Rose is here somewhere. I cannot find her directly. I sense her voice. She must be shy. Jasmine, animals, and resinous delights continue to smooth out into a pashmina of aroma. Very well constructed perfume, this! One of the finest oriental style scents I've experienced. Excellent sillage, especially in fresh air. Very long-lasting.

Animalic notes become even deeper over time. It becomes "amber-y", too. I love it!

A fantastic nostalgic perfume. The opening is ornate and simmering (unashamedly feminine, not playing it cool or coy). It develops a delicious grrr underneath, becoming sensual and satisfying. I was going to use the word ‘coquettish' for Salome, but it is well beyond that, into the realm of vintage Tabu and Bal a Versailles.

The underlying simmer was a big cuminy spice note. Cumin can become either boorish or deliciously skanky. On my skin, Salome's cumin has a warm and opopanax-like burnished note. It isn't a b.o., rather a skanky aroma.

The other basenotes gradually coming in really connected with the cumin, developing a counterpoint to the strong emotive florals, not exactly blending but creating a sort of high-low layering. The sillage was deliciously darkened floral, but if I smelled my skin, it was predominantly cuminy, spicy basenotes. It had a drydown that developed beautifully for hours.

Salome, though a big oriental-styled fragrance, doesn't have a lot of cloying vanilla, the thing I never cared for in orientals (think 80's) and is clearer, leaner, and earthier, so it comes across somewhat floriental to me. The fragrance I think of most in relation to this is Bal A Versailles, but I believe I like Salome more. It's a little clearer and more upfront, and the florals in this are a little brighter. It's a very long lasting fragrance, continuing a full day and into the next morning. Really smashing, but it is an evening and cool weather fragrance. On my skin, the animalics get too smelly in hot weather.

My full flacon just came in!

Salome is a complex, witchy brew expressly designed for erotic contemplation. Cumin and animal musks create an animalic raunch that is undeniable... Yet those of us who adore skanky perfumes will love it. While it is being compared to animalic chypres of yesteryear, no fragrance from perfumery's "Golden Age" (say, 1912--1970) ever dared to be this barnyard dirty... unambiguously so.

Texas cedar figures very prominently in this blend, and I'm surprised it's not offered as one of the notes in the above diagram for rating. There also appear to be some Indian "ayurvedic"-type notes present in this scent, not mentioned either. There is, for instance, a medicinal aromatic afoot... I think it's camphor... an unusual note I love.

Something in the opening notes smells, to me, like the potties one smelled on 1970's Greyhound buses. As in: clean trying to mask un-clean.

Fragrantica, above, lists "leather" as one of its keywords. I guess it's the styrax + castoreum they're observing.

The scent dries down to what seems to be a very...um... woman-like smell, if you catch my meaning. This scent is animalic far beyond that of Muscs Koublai-Khan, Rochas Femme, Kouros, Shalimar, Tabu, Absolue Pour Le Soir, Bal a Versailles. In fact, its only competition for skank-factor might be Brent Leonesios's NO. 8

As I hit a hot, steamy shower tonight, I got a whiff of the tobacco note: it's not fresh tobacco... no, it's stale, grey cigarette smoke, mingling with the civet. My, my-- our SALOME has been a naughty girl in so many ways. But it's intriguing, and adds a further note of audacious loucheness to the mix.

Yet Luca Turin is correct in that, this melange of notes is blended so expertly, so smoothly, that one cannot fault it... It does that classic thing of creating a unique Gestalt all its own.

But I love SALOME. I'm a guy, and will wear it happily anywhere I want. Who knew Bad could be so Good?

I dont dare say what this reminds me of😅.most skanky scent that I own. I only wear it when in a daring mood and in the right company of people that can appreciate it

This smells similar to the bottle of supremely aged Bal à Versailles in the cupboard of an old woman I know. I visit her regularly and always take a chance to sniff the bottle.

This old woman once wanted to be a rabbi but, as a woman, was not allowed official entry into the training program. Undeterred, she went anyway, uncredited, invisible yet never unnoticed, just a complete baller with ultimate self-respect who was not in the slightest interested in the approval of others, only in the path to knowledge.

Reading the reviews about crotches and sex, you might think this an odd mix with either rabbinics or the elderly. I think not. First, I smell a strong soapy note. I think this is just a genetically-determined reaction to one of the components of Salome (and Bal à Versailles), so make sure to try before you buy. I love this effect and think it blends superbly with the other ingredients. It might not be for you although it sure is better than what I guess a urine smell would be like.

Second of all, although Salome herself is depicted as an ineffective seductress in the Christian tradition, in Jewish history she was actually a serious queen. So it often is that the strong women of one tradition are portrayed as shallow sexual vampires by the (male-centred?) tradition which seeks to overwrite it. Well, you need to be a queen to wear this perfume. Some people WILL hate it and you have to rise above that and deliver with supreme confidence.

You weren't allowed in? You go anyway, and excel to the shock of everyone. That's the essence of this fragrance to me.

Papillon Artisan Perfumes / Salome


The olfactory group: Chypre Floral
Odor Characteristic: Hot and bitter
high durability
Play smell: Suitable

Starting note:

The first spray The first thing you'll find is the smell of bitter and sour citrus chords. It will not take more than a few moments.

Rhubarb leaves and dusted wood are old and earthy next guests you experience.

Then the scent gets a bit steady and you will find on the side of smoky, woody, black and burned leather.

Middle notes:

The smell of black-and-white chocolate flavor is a little more. At this stage, the scent of bitter taste, floral and powdery flavor in the fragrance is less fragrant, and the chords are slightly less easily dissolved, but they are heavily dull, animal, dirty and dirty.


Final note:

There is not much difference between notes of this fragrance.
You can clearly see the chords of the previous notes in this stage of perfume.

One of the differences between the notes is the smell of bitterness, the smell of smoke and the presence of a weak vanilla scent that comes with the heat and bitterness I saw first.

At this stage, the weight of the work is reduced and the aroma of black and chocolate will make you enjoyable.

Papillon Artisan Perfumes Salome

Leather aromas are wooden, black, animated and spicy
A collection of heavy notes ...!
Heavy and slightly uniform scent.

Hearty aromatic fragrance so I feel I do not understand the fragrance.
I had not seen any perfume so heavy that it was difficult to separate the chords.

Wearing such an aroma for anyone is not possible. It is dry, heavy and harsh.

You did not expect this perfume to feel excitement and excitement. It may make you feel tired and depressed.
Do not expect much feedback.
The imagination of people around you is scented with smell of silt, heavy leaf and burned wood with warm leather ...!

An image of perfume in your mind will see you in an adult person who has one-handed wine and in the other hand a mint-tobacco cigar and wants to enjoy the magnificent 20th century party.

Your receipt of this perfume will be a person who is decorated, dignified, mysterious, calm and at the same time proud and rogue.

Papillon Salome

You can get dressed for special occasions

For adults, it will be beautiful with raincoats and dark and gray trousers.

I wanted to make the salome a bit more refreshing, more flexible and relaxed, so do not let it off, that this fragrance is suitable for middle-aged adults and I still have to wear it.

Salome has a bipolar state and is full of contradictions, you may fall in love with or hate


Sillage: 4/5

Longevity: 4/5

Scent: 3/5

Overall: 3.75 / 5

A real thriller. A total skank. Oh my, a classically styled wonder.

Salome is resolutely animalic. But it's also fairly floral, powdery, and faintly aldehydic. The effusive opening is uric and ammoniac and indolic, thrusting jasmine like a stadium speaker pounding out bass. The hyraceum (Africa stone) is almost imperceptible, but this deft integration is clearly in play, that sort of old book, history museum hall aura that helps invoke a sense that this perfume was made several decades ago.

Moores has really succeeded in composing something whose sum is much, much greater than its parts; again, the integration here is masterful.

Alluring, and for the courageous and the cognoscenti.

I love animalics and so wanted to love this one. It is incredible, except like ruining a great gourmet meal by accidentally dumping too much salt in, the cumin is WAY too much. I like skanky frags, but cumin is a dangerous note. Amouage Fate Man uses just enough to be interesting, but this has so much that it smells like armpit sweat. Someone who eats tons of curry and cumin forgets their deodorant. The cumin settles down after 5 min. and it gets better, but Wow! The first blast is sweaty!

UPDATE: After 1/2 hr, this settles into a very wearable animalic and the cumin has faded.

Whoa! This is one raunchy scent! This feels like one of those big, old-style vintage perfumes, rich and decadent. In fact it reminds me of another scent, from long ago, but I can't put my finger on it. I can't help picturing one of the 50's screen sirens: skin tight, black satin corset, stockings, posing seductively on a fur rug. I couldn't wait to try this one – I kept on sniffing the sample bottle (courtesy of purecaramel) all last night. This is a sexy, musky, dirty floral, and I like it. I put it on this morning, and I love the way it has evolved. I get the sweetness from the jasmine and the rose, and the lovely tang from the citrus, overlaid with the tobacco, which wafts about me very pleasantly, then I'll get what I'm guessing is the animalic element coming out – it's like all of the ingredients in this all leapt into bed together and got down and dirty. Sex and musk and leather and sweat with the sweetness of the flowers. I'm not normally a day-time vs night-time perfume person, but this to me is what you'd wear out on a romantic night out with your beloved, or a cosy evening in – just the two of you, curled up together on the couch, canoodling and feeding each other strawberries and sipping champagne in front of a toasty warm fire, until you suddenly pounce on each other and it's ON! It's dark and seductive, a total sex-bomb in a bottle. Definitely FBW, definitely on my wish list.

EDIT: I put this on in the morning, then after lunch decided to give my bathroom the damn good cleaning I had been promising it for the last couple of weeks (don't judge!). This afternoon, I could only smell this if I held my wrist to my nose - otherwise all I could smell was cleaning products. So off I trotted to the shower, and as soon as the warm water hit my skin - blam! There was the animalic note, only different this time - wild and earthy and ever so slightly rank. The heat from the water also made the flowers in this spring up again. I've never had a perfume do that before, and it was unusual but very nice.

EDIT: I meant to say earlier - this is the first fragrance I've tried with a strong animalic note to it. I walked out into the kitchen to get breakfast after putting it on, bent to pat the cat, and he hooked his paw around my wrist, pulled it towards himself and spent a good while sniffing at it. He's never done that before with any of my other scents. I wonder which bit caught his attention?

First review: 2 July 2016:
I admit I came to Salome with high expectations. On first tentative sniff, I got a ravishing whiff of what I hoped Salome was going to be--a carnivorous throwback floral laid over gobs of dirty animalics, with plenty of sweet musks and powder. I got some perfume on my hands before I closed the sample vial, and even then, I smelled it, rich and raunchy and alive, and sweet in that weird way that animal musk is sweet. I kept sniffing it and thinking about how glorious this stuff would be when I really opened that vial and let it rip.

So I did, the next day. On application, the roundness I first noticed was still there, in the barbaric yawp of civet and castoreum, married to something that hinted at jasmine and maybe rose. Then the florals fell away completely. A cloud of cumin rose from the animalics, burned my nose, and then hovered there for two hours. It was very hard to smell anything else while the cumin was present. After it receded, I could smell the sweet musk mixed with the hot cumin for hours, but only very close to skin.

There's no mistaking the provocative nature of the animalics here, so I'm not too bothered that this has quite discreet sillage. I am, however, trying to figure out what this perfume really wants to be. On my skin, it smells like a spicy Oriental, from somewhere in the neighborhood of Opium--if Opium were dazed and supine on a bed of plush musks, its spices ground to the finest powder.

I wanted those florals from the opening to bloom over the top of the animal and spice, but maybe that's just me. Maybe that would have been gilding the lily. Maybe this is all skin chemistry, and other people get a more satisfying, more balanced perfume than I did when I tested this. But I tried it again, and the same thing happened. (My skin amps bitter tones and tamps down sweetness, which is one reason I wear some loud florals.) The spice and musk in Salome actually come off a bit rugged on me. With that and its whisper of florals, I'd like to smell this on a man--if it calmed down and came together long enough for me to do it.

Neutral for now. To be revisited in future.

First edit: after a second test, I woke up the next day with the most amazing scent on my wrist. This occurred right before Basenotes went down for maintenance a few days ago on 7/28/2016. I'm buying a bottle, but the jury is still out.

Second edit: 3 October 2017
After a year and change, I've done a more-or-less 180 degree turn from (most of) my former opinion. (I also have no idea what I was talking about when I mentioned "discreet sillage," because this gal is not shy). Salome now ranks among my very favorite perfumes, from anywhere, anytime. Its ad copy reads, "Slip into your second skin," and that's how I've come to feel about it. Big, old-school florals are my wheelhouse, and Salome occupies a place of honor smack in the center. I owe the perfume, and Liz Moores, a better and more detailed review--but for now, I hope this amendment will do.

One thing I will say for now: I understand that, compared with the vintage perfumes that inspired it, Salome feels relatively loud and crude in comparison. It's sort of like the difference between the finesse used by the Old Masters' paintings and the thickly smeared gobs of textured oil we see in 20th century painting (representational or non)--in fact, Salome's drydown in particular feels blended like the thickly applied paint that modern artists use to completely obliterate the canvas behind it. But Salome is homage, not pastiche--it's a statement of feudal allegiance rather than a servile imitation. I know of few perfumes that rock the vintage vibe with as much flair and panache--and also with the gonads to put the most challenging aspects of vintage perfumery front and center to boot. Impressive stuff.

Salome was a bit of a first for me. I wasn't sure what to expect based on reviews and descriptions of this fragrance. I decided to see for myself and acquired a sample for testing.

Upon opening the vile, I was kind of weary about putting this on my skin. I had never worn anything in the realm of this pungent, spicy smelling juice before, and didn't know if I could pull it off. I wanted to give it a chance though, so I dabbed the tiniest amount on my neck and waited for my wife to declare her disgust (she doesn't usually like animalistics). But to my surprise, she actually liked this on me. I was relieved because I really liked wearing it!

The drydown reminds me of a particular incense that we used to burn in our house growing up. I will say, be careful not to overdo it; a little goes a loooooong way. Sillage is nuclear, and longevity is immortal. I love the evolution of Salome on my skin. The rosy, floral notes I smell, quickly part, bowing to the animalistic, earthy undertones and that heady tranquil incense.

This is now one of my favorite fragrances to layer. I won't wear it by itself because I feel it is too strong and a little overwhelming. By no means is it a second fiddle however. It's silage and longevity are so un relenting, it will gradually take over, and becomes the final act in an olfactory concerti. I reiterate, use sparingly, because too much of a good thing...

During the first moments of the opening stage one could be forgiven to believe that this is heading into a floral direction. There is a dirty and darkish jasmin background than allows a lovely carnation to shine, with a rose and whiffs of lilac.

This initial second are treacherous, for nigh immediately a styrax-patchouli duet develops and takes over the plot. It is a spicy and leathery pairing, dark with musky and civery undertones and castoreum nuances added in. The patchouli is crisp with an edge, but not exceedingly harsh - this is no Purple Patchouli.

At times a slightly powdery sweetness is present, and towards the later stages an oakmoss impression emerges. This oakmoss is quite well done, but is lack natural liveliness; more the result of an arithmetic olfactory than an inspiredly creative injection of inspiration.

The performance is powerhouse material on my skin: strong projection, excellent projection and a gargantuan fifteen hours on my skin.

A good winter leather/spicy winter scent, not too harsh, than is well-made but a bit following trodden paths. A good technical implementation though, and overall a nice creation. 3.25/5.

You'll think you're back in the heyday of fragrance, wearing this: dense, animalic to the nth degree, with smoky florals in the background, Salome is something Germaine Cellier (she, of Bandit) could have created. To my nose, Salome might even be the offspring of vintage Bandit and Opium. Marvelous.

This is a gorgeous, vintage-y, winged-eyeliner-and-beauty-mark, SEX POT of a fragrance. The smoke, the indolic flowers, the deeply unsettling and very carnal humanness of this scent is like nothing I've smelled before (except perhaps Tabu in extrait concentration).

I do I have to admit that Salome is somewhat challenging to wear. The dry down is truly beautiful, but waiting for this to calm down and lose a bit of its hyrax and cumin-filled skank takes time and patience I don't always possess. A judicious and moderate application is probably key.

Definitely not an everyday scent, unless you're lusting for someone's head on a platter.