The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
Cilice arrived in 2015, one of the earliest releases from Euphorium Brooklyn. The brand leans into a mythology that wraps every bottle in something older than it is, and Cilice is where that instinct shows up most clearly. Stephen Dirkes, the perfumer behind the house, built it around incense, beeswax, leather, and a woody accord the marketing describes as wounded. The name itself refers to a hair shirt, the coarse garment worn by penitents as an act of self-mortification. That tells you what you're signing up for: a composition designed to feel less like a perfume and more like a reckoning, something heavy and intentional, built to linger on the skin and in the room long after the first spray fades.
The composition's backbone is frankincense, labdanum, and birch tar, a trio that leans heavily into smoke and sweetness at once. Beeswax and honey add something almost devotional, like candles burned down to the altar, giving the dry warmth that keeps the whole thing from tipping into pure austerity. Castoreum and oud anchor the leather, giving it that animalic undertone that makes the whole thing feel less like a cologne and more like a room someone has lived in for years.
The evolution
The first thirty minutes are the sharpest: elemi resin and frankincense cut through with that almost-medical clarity, and the birch tar shows up fast, pulling the whole opening toward something charred and smoky. Labdanum and honey soften it just enough to keep it wearable, rounding the sharper edges before the resins take full command. By the two-hour mark the incense has settled and the leather takes over, deep and slightly sweet from the beeswax underneath. The castoreum is subtle but present, giving the mid-phase a skin-like warmth that feels lived-in rather than perfumed, almost as if the fragrance has settled into the wearer rather than sitting on top of them.
Cultural impact
Cilice tends to come up in the same conversations as Slumberhouse Norne and Francesca Bianchi's Byzantine Amber, three compositions that share a devotion to smoke, resin, and the kind of density that resists easy categorization. Each one reads less like a conventional fragrance and more like a constructed environment, a scent with its own weather. Within the Euphorium Brooklyn catalog, Cilice shares territory with Wald, though Cilice lands heavier on wax and resin while Wald pulls toward greener, more forested territory.
The House
Euphorium BrooklynEuphorium Brooklyn is a niche fragrance house founded by artist and self-taught perfumer Stephen Dirkes in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. The brand draws its name and inspiration from a fictional enterprise called Euphorium Bile Works, which the founder's mythology places in 1860s Brooklyn. Each fragrance from the house carries this narrative weight, blending historical fiction with olfactory artistry. The collection spans dark, smoky compositions like Wald and Cilice, alongside brighter studies such as Ume (inspired by Lady Murasaki's Tale of Genji) and the gourmand Chocolatl. Handcrafted with reportedly rare and exotic materials, the house occupies a distinctive position in contemporary niche perfumery, appealing to collectors who value unconventional storytelling and bold, characterful scents.
The Creator
Stephen DirkesDirkes brings a filmmaker's sense of pacing to fragrance composition. He builds scents that reveal themselves gradually, with layers that do not simply coexist but interact.
