Kilian’s first steps were naturally incandescent. Emerging quietly, but with a velvet passion, drawing from their mysterious darkness a merciless burst of perfumes in a definitive blast. A sort of final song as if everything were to end there. Make a noise, think like a perfumer in the nineteenth century, sweep aside, bypass, slice through the ambient culture (RnB, Snoop Dogg), make the “black album” (Prince) with biting iris (Florence and its suppressed cruelty), Calabrian bergamot, Tunisian neroli. And then, afterwards: a deep, pregnant silence.

Why shouldn’t Eve have the situation in hand? She has put herself at risk. And she has no problem with that. The serpent thinks it can wrap itself around her. Wrong: she’s the one who’ll control the embrace. This is how the perfumes in this venomous collection work – Playing With The Devil, Good Girl Gone Bad – with their sensual, insistent intermingling; an animality sweetened by Arabian jasmine, Opoponax resinoid. Fruity but not mawkish, with the tang of spicy and woody notes. A sort of irresistible, narcotic, disinhibited stupor. An almost palpable evocation, a tactile emotion. These sillages run through centuries as swiftly as sin.

A remedy for every trouble, a way to keep hold of our passions. Such is our lot, so why not anticipate this consented addiction? Four fragrances, four seductive poisons, four exciting escapades. A perfume shouldn’t stop us in our tracks; it is a bridge, a flying carpet, a diagonal line, an unexpected resonance. It drops us into a terribly appealing new place, addictive with its bitter and sensual bite of green cardamom, tobacco, smoked birch, “hallucinogenic” nutmeg. So what has us in its grip? The perfume in the bottle, or our own self in its vaporised spray?

One day Kilian had an experience that haunted him for weeks. Something seemingly insignificant: an innocent bowl of coconut rice pudding. But illuminating this childhood favourite there was a wonderfully juicy piece of mango. It left an intense, divinely voluptuous sensation: the sensual abandonment in this fragrance blown away by a lemon-grapefruit citrus duo with a spicy bite of pink pepper, enlaced with tonka bean and vetiver. It felt like a reconnection; both yielding to the sensation and being reborn. The mouth wanting more, the skin teasing for having been robbed.

A very 1950s scent makes its entrance, incognita and self-confident. What’s more, its thrilling irreverence makes the chest rise – as it catches breath, picks up the scent of danger, the sensual depths: here is where the perfume’s mesh operates. The body lowers its guard, seems to surrender to avoid being ensnared in the intermingled sandalwood, rum, almond and coffee – and a dash of cyanide that, from the thermal waters of Baden-Baden to Kilian, seals a pact with the devil. Death lurking in its ambiguous darknesses, staved off, kept waiting. Captivate, the better to release.

Strive to transcend Gold and to bring out its essentially tactile nature: this was Klimt’s obsession also throughout his work, as fascinates us in his magnificently sensual portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer. Kilian explored this resonant duality in two perfumes that conjure up dark and light, femininity and masculinity. Thereby creating an aura of hidden and timeless depths. One of the most intriguing compositions.

A remedy for every trouble, a way to keep hold of our passions. Such is our lot, so why not anticipate this consented addiction? Four fragrances, four seductive poisons, four exciting escapades. A perfume shouldn’t stop us in our tracks; it is a bridge, a flying carpet, a diagonal line, an unexpected resonance. It drops us into a terribly appealing new place, addictive with its bitter and sensual bite of green cardamom, tobacco, smoked birch, “hallucinogenic” nutmeg. So what has us in its grip? The perfume in the bottle, or our own self in its vaporised spray?

This collection of five fragrances created by Kilian evokes that strange relationship that Asia has with the air: what makes a garment comfortable to wear (note the spaces in between, the movement of the fabric) is also to be found in these sillages that slide like rice paper screens. It gives onto a lily pond or a bedroom where a girl lies sleeping. Evanescent magnolia and white peach, and sometimes a sharper note, a muffled cry in the night, an exquisite effervescence. The snow-woman who disappears if you get too close, a melting feeling in the eyes of love. Time for a divine interlude, a newfound serenity. We live on a sliding world; perfume has to be impermanent.

A city is an inspiration, a singular receptacle. In a destination, there is a sort of quest for the unfamiliar, for a feeling, for something unknown. A smell, a woollen fabric, voices, an accent . . . For these alone, we sometimes travel to the other side of the world. And we make the journey because something unique awaits us there. This is why Kilian began to hunt for the spirit of a city, probing it the better to slip it into his boxes, creating a poetical new geography: Apple Brandy in New York, Vodka on the Rocks in Moscow, Pearl Oud in Doha, Lemon in Zest in Lugano, Royal Leather in Mayfair . . . You’re tempted to make the trip yourself, just to catch the scent. And take off with it.