Les Bois de Caves

Black Phantom - Memento Mori Kilian 2017

Bottle Design:
Carré Basset

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7.9 / 10 1393 Ratings

A popular perfume by Kilian for women and men, released in 2017. The scent is gourmand-sweet. The longevity is above-average. It is being marketed by Estēe Lauder Companies.
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Main accords

Gourmand

Sweet

Spicy

Woody

Creamy

Fragrance Notes

Caribbean rum Coffee

Coffee

Cane sugar

Sandalwood Cyanide

Cyanide

Java vetiver

Perfumer

Sidonie Lancesseur

Ratings

Scent

7.91393 Ratings

Longevity

8.21263 Ratings

Sillage

7.71262 Ratings

Bottle

8.51226 Ratings

Value for money

6.4848 Ratings

Submitted by Danina, last update on 07/12/2025.

Interesting Facts

The fragrance is part of the "Les Bois de Caves" collection.

Smells similar

What the fragrance is similar to

Spectre Wraith

Black Widow

Insomnia

Dalika

Phantom My Hero

Dark Knight Parfum Extract

Reviews

59 in-depth fragrance descriptions

02/12/2025

8
Pricing 8
Bottle 7
Sillage 8
Longevity 8.5
Scent

Moshikoko
84 Reviews

Moshikoko

Top Review 9

Coffee and rum please

A spectacular Gourmand perfume.
The combination of coffee with rum is perfect.

Gives a luxurious and caressing feeling.
I recommend wearing this perfume in the evening and cold nights.

What is certain is that this perfume will attract the attention of your dates ;)

In terms of performance, the longevity of this perfume is average and the sillage is not exciting either and it stays mostly close to the skin.

8/10.

11/16/2021

7
Pricing 10
Bottle 8
Sillage 8
Longevity 10
Scent

Nathan
7 Reviews

Nathan

Helpful Review 9

Gourmand lover’s dream come true

A lot of times when I have come across a gourmand, I find myself thinking it’s too sweet, or too cloying or generally just too much. But when I first tried Black Phantom, I knew I had to get a full bottle, no matter the cost. This is how a gourmand should be in my opinion. Filled with dark chocolate, rum, caramel, coffee and sugar cane… This stuff is mouthwatering. Black Phantom takes a dark and mysterious, yet incredibly addictive take on a gourmand fragrance.

People get curious whenever I wear this, as if they haven’t smelled something like this before. That’s what I really enjoy about Black Phantom. Even though it’s a fantastic gourmand, it still manages to stand out from the rest. It’s still the best gourmand I have ever laid my nose on hands down. I could not ask for more. It’s really yummy, unique, addictive and very luxurious. It also gives off a vibe of some sort of chocolaty/caramel deliciousness, served at a restaurant that’s really expensive.

I found very few people who dislike this fragrance. If you like gourmands in general, this is almost a blind buy, and I’m the type of guy that HATES blind buys! Says a lot really. If you like your gourmand not too sweet, but still addictive and refined, this is a must try. I only go for 2 sprays, 3 max on this one… Longevity is amazing (8-10 hours) and it projects really well. Sillage is mesmerizing and you will evoke a great curiosity around you, from the lucky ones, who get the pleasure to catch sudden whiffs of you. I’m gonna end all this by letting you in on a secret… And tell you how much I love this perfume. It may sound really corny… But the very first time I got a full bottle of this, I had a sudden urge to rip off the atomizer, and drink all the damn liquid. Yes, it’s that delicious! What an absolute wonderful release from Kilian, they really set new standards for gourmands with this one.

06/10/2024

1
Pricing 2
Sillage 10
Longevity 8
Scent

AngeloMani
4 Reviews

AngeloMani

6

Phantasm

Disclaimer: this is my opinion, based on my personal experience, and on my maybe broken sense of smell, and you may not agree with it. So:

If you want coffee - try Coffee Addict or Little Song.
If you want chocolate - try Wicked Good.
If you want rum - try Side Effect or Bvlgari Man In Black.

You cannot find much of these notes in a recently produced Black Phantoms. (even though chocolate is not even a note in the composition)

Maybe your older batches / pre-reformulation bottles are juggernaughts, but nowadays, you can only get a bottle that gives you a faint soft smell in the dry-down, reminiscent of sweet sandalwood, maybe. I've tried several bottles, in 3 diff. shops + my own bottle.
It's not masculine, not even a fragrance, just a soft, pleasant smell of something.

I also think that Mr. Kilian Hennessy never smelled the sweet, full-bodied dark rums of Cuba and surrounding islands, only maybe French or other sour, unpleasant, tangy rums. At least, his cognacs are much sweeter than his rums. Which is a shame. This could have been a top top scent.

And the price is like 5x more than it is worth in my book.

09/15/2024

5
Pricing 8
Bottle 7
Sillage 7
Longevity 8.5
Scent

Musicandarts
206 Reviews

Musicandarts

5

An excellent gourmand with coffee and bitter almond

This review is based on a 7.5ml vial from a discovery set for The Woody Cellars collection. This is more than a discovery set as 7.5 ml is a lot of perfume. As this translates 15-20 uses, this should last for a while.

This is a creation of Sidonie Lancesseur, who has designed many of Kilian’s flagship perfumes. The full name of this perfume is Black Phantom - Memento Mori. Memento Mori translates roughly into ‘Remember you will die”. The whole things smells of kitschy marketing. Is the perfumer suggesting that that the bitter almond (cyanide) reminds us of death and murder? Anyway, in case you missed the connection to death, the full bottle is also available in a lockable coffret with a black skull attached to it. Not surprisingly, Black Phantom does not evoke death to me. Can any perfume evoke something as profound as death, unless you are an angst-ridden teenager?

The opening notes are coffee and cyanide (essentially the bitter almond accord), but embellished with a set of lovely ancillary notes. I can smell vetiver, but the other listed notes - cane sugar and sandalwood - are lost in the pungent backdrop. There is also a hint of some sort of alcohol, which the perfumer lists as Caribbean rum. It could be, but I would have also believed cognac or absinthe. The combination of this mysterious spirit, coffee, vetiver and cyanide makes this perfume appear medicinal, the exact opposite of death. These notes are the heart notes and they eventually turn into the base notes. I don’t find a clear olfactory pyramid in Black Phantom. But I find that it becomes a bit more woody and sweet in the end, when the coffee and almond goes down.

The performance on my skin is very good, though not monstrous. It lasted for 6-8 hours on my skin, and longer on my clothes. The sweet woody dry down survives for almost the entire day. The sillage is very good at a few feet as long as the heart notes are alive. I wonder what this bitter almond-coffee perfume tells the world when you walk by.

If you are in search of a lovely sweet coffee cyanide perfume with liquor notes, this is a great option. The only time you contemplate mortality is when you see the listed price of $295 for 50 ml. If you think that you can’t take all that wealth with you when you die, please feel free to spent it on Black Phantom. I would buy it around $150 for 50 ml. Be very aware of the hype surrounding this perfume when you test it. If its name was Lattafa Coffee Oasis, would you still buy it?

12/21/2024

6
Pricing 6
Sillage 8
Longevity 7
Scent

Ceesie
107 Reviews

Ceesie

Helpful Review 3

Presentation is key

Black Phantom, gotta love that name. It’s dark, eerie. Just like a coffee that’s poisoned. And that’s what it smells like. Coffee with some sweetness but also some high-pitched, medicinal, piercing woodsmell.

It’s a wonderful thing really, I can imagine that wearing this while dressed up in a nice suit you’ll gain quite some respect.

I myself don’t dress up very often so it’s not really my thing. I based this review on a discovery set, which had some great samples. This was certainly one of them.

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