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Salome Papillon Artisan Perfumes 2015

8.2 / 10 315 Ratings

A popular perfume by Papillon Artisan Perfumes for women and men, released in 2015. The scent is animal-floral. Projection and longevity are above-average. It is still in production.
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Main accords

Animal

Floral

Spicy

Chypre

Resinous

Fragrance Notes

Hyraceum

Jasmine

Carnation

Musk

Turkish rose

Perfumer

Liz Moores

Ratings

Scent

8.2315 Ratings

Longevity

8.7259 Ratings

Sillage

8.1256 Ratings

Bottle

7.5215 Ratings

Value for money

7.6120 Ratings

Submitted by Michael, last update on 11/17/2025.

Smells similar

What the fragrance is similar to

Bal à Versailles Eau de Toilette

Femme (1989) Eau de Toilette

Bal à Versailles Parfum

Bal à Versailles Eau de Cologne

Musc Tonkin Extrait de Parfum

Derby (1985) Eau de Toilette

Reviews

34 in-depth fragrance descriptions

01/12/2022

8.5Scent 10Longevity 7Sillage

Kurai
388 Reviews

Kurai

Helpful Review 12

Femme Fatale

The story of Salome - her dance before Herod with the head of John the Baptist on a platter - has been an inspiration to artists for centuries. She has become an early icon of female seduction, a temptress who lures you away from salvation.

Now, I can tell you upfront that wearing Papillon's Salome is not going turn you into that spellbinding seductress. Except to a very select audience maybe. In the eyes, err nose, of most people this scent is so intimidating that it has the exact opposite effect. However, the drama is certainly there. The contrast of that young girl's dance and the brutally severed head can be found in the appealing floral heart versus the feral musks.

The scent profile has a lot in common with the classic floral chypres. Typically, these perfumes have a pronounced floral heart on base of moss, with some support of animal musks. Papillon's Salome reverses the ratios in its composition so that the musks take a much more prominent role amongst the floral chypre accords.

The opening is very intense with its hyrax-furry type of musk. It is accompanied by a good set of florals and a serious amount of moss. Slowly it all settles down into something more castoreum-like: warm and enveloping, almost balsamic-oriental.

Salome is often compared to Muscs Koublai Khan and Musc Tonkin because of the animalic character. The similarities are obviously there, but to me Salome is not so much a stand-alone musk hommage. It feels much more like a re-worked classical chypre theme and a quite successful one, if you ask me.

Despite its intensity, I would put it in the introvert section. It's a perfume to wear on evenings at home, while reading a book for example, so you can fully dive into its depth and complexity. Social settings are a no-go, at least for the first hour or two.

12/12/2015

9Scent

Tinctureall
94 Reviews

Tinctureall

Very helpful Review 3

An iconic monster of a floral. A carnal and delightful, playful badass.

This opens with a huge powdery cumin, coupling rudely with an enormous and indolic Jasmin of a sambac nature. The powder aspect is an enormously fat, enveloping rose that wobbles provocatively on the already warmed up bedsheets, twirling her cuminesque, spicy floral underwear. The gigantic base of musk and hyraceum remind one of the old school vintage florals meant to be applied hours before leaving. The music is on full volume, and this one is enjoying the heady nature of the newly applied and smouldering perfume cloud, whilst attending to an immaculate make up and hair. This person is wicked beyond bounds, but nearly looks polite, except the eyes give the game away, flashing with improper intent.

This is not polite kissing, this is dark and carnal desire. This is sweaty and animalic sex with the Jamine clad badass. On skin, the enormous florals balance as perfectly as a set of fine scales, but writhing indecently with the cumin, the musk and the hyraceum underneath. The powdery aspects keep the whole beastie more or less within polite bounds but they don't deceive anyone for a second. This is just not polite.

Adoration, compete adoration, but for goodness sake don't go and visit your mother in law to be, wearing this.

08/01/2025

ClaireV
969 Reviews

ClaireV

Very helpful Review 3

A greatest hits tour of the fragrance skankiverse

Salome is a tour of the greatest hits of the fragrance skankiverse, sampling riffs from well-loved songs such as vintage Bal a Versailes, Musc Tonkin, Femme, and Theo Fennel Scent, and spinning them off into something that, while not new or wildly original, is an utter pleasure to wear. And it is such a beautiful and accomplished riff on those fragrances that one might be tempted to replace some or all of them with just Salome.

It is a ludicrously dense, packed fragrance. A super-saturated supernova of a scent with layers and layers of heavy musks, fur, flowers, spice, and sweat.Let me try to unpack the layers. Right away, I smell a layer of vintage Bal a Versailles floating on top - honeyed orange blossoms, tobacco-leather, and a refined urine note (possibly civet).

And wow, Salome is also super-cuminy. This layer strongly recalls Rochas Femme - not the softer, muskier vintage version, but the modern version which fairly shrieks with cumin, put there to give Femme back the sex curves it lost when all manner of nitro musks were banned. The cumin gives Salome a crude sexuality, reminiscent of a musky, female crotch - not unwashed crotch, just, um,….. heated, shall we say. If you're someone who thinks that Amouage's Jubilation 25 (the woman's version) or Al Oudh smell like the armpits of a New York cab driver, then avoid Salome at all costs.

Under all this, there are heavy, animalic musks providing a sort of subwoofer effect, amplifying and fluffing up the other notes. I can easily identify two of my favorite musks here. First to reach my nose (and then fade away very quickly) is a rich, furry musk strongly reminiscent of Muscs Khoublai Khan. This is mostly the effect of a rich, warm castoreum soaked in rose oil, but the similarity is impressive. MKK and Salome share this unique effect of the musk almost taking up a physical presence in front of your nose, like the swelling scent of damp hair or a damp fur coat being dried off in front of an old-fashioned electric bar heater. I can't quite explain it, but the musk here has a tactile quality quite like sticking your nose above an agora sweater and feeling the static pulling the fine angora hairs towards your nostrils.

Underneath the short-lived MKK-style musk is the almost painfully animalic musk from Musc Tonkin - one so utterly redolent of the fur and animal fat of a marine animal that it comes off as faintly briny. Thankfully, though, it never quite approaches that metallic edge that Musc Tonkin has (which fascinates me but also repels me in equal measure). But that salty, fatty animal aspect of Musc Tonkin's musk is present in Salome to a large degree. It accounts for the scent's overall savory profile (as opposed to sweet).

More than anything, though, Salome reminds me of the female-sweat-soaked, musky Scent by Theo Fennell. In fact, what unites Salome, Theo Fennell Scent, and to a lesser degree, Musc Tonkin (in my mind) is the mental image I have of a group of ladies visiting each other in a formal front room in the early 1900s. It is a picture of repressed Victoriana - a room almost suffocating under the weight of dying flowers in vases, a certain 'closed in' feel of an over-heated room, and stiff, rustling garments that haven't been washed or aired recently.

And just below the surface, a massive wall of scent roiling off damp, heated womanflesh too long cooped up in restrictive brassieres and corsets. Although the room is heavily perfumed with roses and jasmine, there is something unhealthy and morbid about the atmosphere. It's just the type of perverseness I find sexy.

Overall, Salome has a very vintage vibe to it. If one were to subtract the brash cumin and one of the saltier animal secretions, then it would take up a more recognizably French, classical form. Underneath all the animal howling and beating of the breast, Salome is a chypre and as such has a dark, abstract structure to it that stops the dirtier elements from being a total pork fest. In its last gasps, Salome takes on the 1970's feel of La Nuit by Paco Rabanne with its dank honey and moss tones. Salome might be a remix rather than an original, but it reminds me that, in terms of sheer enjoyment, remixes can sometimes surpass or replace the original.

03/10/2025

5Scent 8Longevity 2Sillage

DorothyGrace
107 Reviews

DorothyGrace

Helpful Review 5

Salome from 2015

According to Kafkaesque blog interview with Liz Moores this perfume (as at the date of the blog 2015 at any rate) was 68% naturals and 32% synthetics (synthetics including musks). My sample is from 2015 and I have not smelt newer batches so whether or not this has had one of the dreaded reformulations is impossible for me to know.

The list of naturals (on the blog) included:
Annimals of hyraceum, civet, and castoreum
Florals of carnation, jasmine, rose, and orange blossom
Citruses of bergamot, and bitter red orange
Woody smells of patchouli, oakmoss, tobacco, and sweet hay
Spices of clove bud, and cumin,
Balsam/sweet notes of vanilla, and styrax,
Smoke notes of birch tar

The blog didn't go into the synthetics, which of course could be anything.

My sample is in great condition, despite being a little 2 ml decant into a glass tube with a plastic dipping stick. I haven't opened it often so there is that.

There is a cold, slightly medicinal note that bothers me a bit but other than that it is a dry, woody, earthy, floral ( get mostly carnation) with a noticeable birch tar.

The room where I put the perfume on is much more sweet and floral in comparison to my skin which just smells of slightly plasticine (could be civet which smells a bit like dirty plasticine to me), musky, earthy, smokey woods with that slight medicinal note.

I'd wear this in the summer on long walks in the managed woods of old country estates now parks. I think its woody, animal, florals wouldn't be out of place sitting on an old fallen tree trunk eating a picnic.

I think I would like a bottle but would have to buy another sample as ten years is a long time in perfumery and I am of the opinion that rules on what can and can't go into a perfume will have forced a tweak or two (or three ha ha).

01/03/2016

5Scent 10Longevity 5Sillage

Drseid
828 Reviews

Drseid

Helpful Review 3

Heavy Animalics Are Marred By Additional Dirty Spice...

Salome opens with a honeyed musky orange before quickly moving to its heart. As the composition enters its early heart, the initial musky orange turns into indolic orange blossom, as an absolutely huge amount of starring dirty cumin spice enters, joined by co-starring animalic hyrax, with dirty jasmine and slightly powdery carnation in support. During the late dry-down the dirty florals and the cumin recede and finally vacate, leaving the remnants of the animalic hyrax and now moderately powdery carnation to join hay-like coumarin through the finish. Projection is average, but longevity outstanding at well over 15 hours on skin.

Salome has been making quite the splash on the perfume scene since its release last year in 2015. One of the frequently mentioned standout attributes claimed is its heavy use of animalics, and this reviewer definitely concurs, for better or for worse. The key animalic attribute used in the composition's heart is hyrax. The best way to describe hyrax is an animalic hybrid with characteristics of musk, civet and castoreum. In the case of Salome, the musk aspect comes out early, and as time passes the smooth castoreum facet takes control in the late dry-down with the civet relatively subdued throughout. If the liberal use of hyrax isn't animalic enough for you, the perfumer adds indolic jasmine and orange blossom to the mix for an increased dirty nature to the composition. While one might think all these indoles and musky animalics would be too much to handle, surprisingly they work to a relatively large degree, especially late when the castoreum-like facet of the hyrax controls. Unfortunately, there is a big show-stopper here, and it is in the form of an extremely large amount of dirty cumin spice that shows up seconds after initial application and dominates through the early heart, not completely vacating until the late-dry-down. This dirty spice is wholly unnecessary and overpowering to the extreme. It is as if the perfumer wants to dare the wearer to see just how far over the line they can go before crying "Uncle". For this writer, the animalics, while not really to my taste were tolerable, the indolic florals while additionally not to my taste were surprisingly interesting, and the powdery carnation never got too powdery to call it a day. Unfortunately, that dirty cumin used was just too darn much, particularly when added to the already overly dirty animalic mix. At the end of the day, Salome is the kind of composition one can appreciate as a work of art, but wearing it is quite another thing and this writer *wears* perfumes. The bottom line is the $160 per 50ml bottle Salome is definitely a departure from the common, bland "fresh" compositions of today, but while its heavy indolic florals and deep musky animalics are tough to wear but never overly-so, its dirty cumin absolutely is, earning it an "average" 2.5 stars out of 5 rating and a neutral recommendation. Setting aside the rating, if deep musky animalics with dirty cumin spice work for you, absolutely give Salome a try as it is bound to impress (though I would argue many vintage spicy animalic perfumes smell better, are much more wearable and can be had for considerably less money with some effort), but if heavy animalics, indoles and dirty spice are not your thing, this one will scare the heck out of you!

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