The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
The Garden of Good & Evil collection gave By Kilian permission to explore duality, light and shadow, restraint and indulgence, the sacred and the forbidden. Playing With The Devil was built around a single question: what if the fruit in the Garden didn't apologize for being eaten? Calice Becker worked with tart blood orange and rose-tinged lychee as the opening act, fruits that are sweet but know their own power. Then she introduced heat, allspice and black pepper, to complicate the softness. The name came last, or maybe it came first. With By Kilian, it's hard to tell.
The adversarial relationship between fruity and spiced is the structural heart of this composition. Most fruity-florals let the sweetness win by default, more berries, more petals, softer everything. Playing With The Devil does the opposite. The top is lush: blackcurrant, white peach, litchi. The heart introduces allspice and black pepper, and those spices don't complement the fruit, they challenge it. Rose and jasmine sit in the middle ground, caught between the sweetness above and the heat below. It's a composition built on tension rather than harmony, which is unusual for a fragrance with 'playing' in its name and lychee in its notes.
The evolution
The opening arrives fast, blood orange zest and lychee sweetness within seconds, blackcurrant rounding out the edges. It smells expensive and immediate. Within twenty minutes, the spices arrive: pimento first, then black pepper pushing through like an interruption. The florals, rose and jasmine, appear but don't settle. They hover, caught between the fruity top and the woody base that's beginning to emerge. By the second hour, sandalwood and cedar have taken over, patchouli adding density beneath. The fruit hasn't disappeared, it lingers in the background, kept alive by benzoin's resinous warmth. The final act is vanilla and tonka bean, sweet and warm and almost soft. But the woods beneath them don't soften. They hold. On fabric, this fragrance persists into the next day, a faint warmth that smells like the aftermath of something that mattered.
Cultural impact
Released in 2013 as part of the Garden of Good & Evil collection, Playing With The Devil won the Fragrance Foundation's Indie Fragrance of the Year award in 2014, a significant recognition for a house that was only seven years old. The fragrance established By Kilian's ability to create compositions that are simultaneously luxurious and confrontational. It's cited in community discussions as a signature scent for people who want fragrance to have a point of view, one that's flirtatious rather than safe.
