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By Kilian now generally presented officially as KILIAN PARIS is releasing three new eau de parfums this month under The Cocktails Collection: Midnight Espresso, Piña Paraíso, and Sparkling Royal, each built around a specific drink. The French niche house, founded by Kilian Hennessy on his family’s cognac history and known for rich gourmand fragrances and bottles with a signature brass clasp, is selling the trio through Sephora, priced at $37 for 10ml and $150 for 75ml in the US.
Mathieu Nardin composed two of the three fragrances. He built Midnight Espresso and Piña Paraíso. Midnight Espresso opens on coffee and rum. Chocolate and toasted hazelnut fill the heart. Benzoin and vanilla sit underneath. Of the three, this is the one built to hold up in a warm room over several hours.
Nardin was born in Grasse into a family of growers and picked jasmine and roses in his grandparents’ fields before training as a perfumer at ISIPCA. He began his career at Robertet and later joined Mane, where he built a reputation on Rose Silence and Vetiver Insolent for Miller Harris, plus Jacquard for Etro and Iris de Champs for Houbigant. He has composed for By Kilian before. Fièvre Verte, an absinthe fragrance in the house’s Liquors collection, was his first collaboration with Kilian Hennessy, so this isn’t his introduction to the brand’s codes.
Piña Paraíso runs the same underlying build with a different set of notes on top. Pineapple and rum lead, coconut and frangipani take the heart, and tonka bean and vanilla close it out. Both fragrances start sharp and end soft, a build Nardin has used before across his other work. The scent, according to the house, has close ties to Copacabana, golden sand, and slowed-down time.
Becker’s formula leans into rose and citrus, territory she has worked in for decades and long before By Kilian existed. She composed J’Adore for Dior in 1999, Tommy Girl for Tommy Hilfiger, and Beyond Paradise for Estée Lauder. She has also composed for By Kilian specifically since 2007, when she worked on A Taste of Heaven, Beyond Love, and Liaisons Dangereuses, and she returned to the house this March with the relaunched Forbidden Games under Les Fleurs Narcotiques.
Sparkling Royal is her second confirmed By Kilian credit this year, after Forbidden Games. Becker’s career stretches back to 1990, when she reworked Balmain’s Vent Vert and Monsieur Balmain, and she now also directs the perfumery school at Givaudan, training the next generation of noses alongside her own commissions.
Sparkling Royal skips the gourmand base entirely. It opens with mint and lemon, meant to mimic the first fizz off a poured glass. Wild currant and Bulgarian rose take the heart, and a blackcurrant liqueur accord makes the Kir Royal reference explicit in the blend. Tonka bean and musk finish it.
AURA Candle Bar’s annual fragrance trend report names sip-inspired scents among its top categories for 2026, and other houses have already put product behind the idea this year. Lorenzo Pazzaglia’s Summer Hammer runs mango, pineapple, coconut, and rum through an extrait concentration marketed as a vacation fragrance. Tiziana Terenzi’s Kirkè takes a similar tropical fruit base and sets it over white musk. Boozy, fruit-heavy gourmands have been appearing across niche perfumery in 2026, and By Kilian is putting three of them out under one collection at once.
The Cocktails Collection lands in the middle of an unusually active year for the house. Her Majesty launched in January as By Kilian’s first chypre, co-created with perfumer Caroline Dumur around a Kyoto sakura theme.
Forbidden Games came back in March under Becker. Vodka on the Rocks was repackaged this year too, folded into a reworked version of The Liquors collection under perfumer Sidonie Lancesseur, with the original composition left unchanged.
Kilian Hennessy built the house on his family’s cognac heritage, and The Liquors collection, with fragrances like Angels’ Share and Old Fashioned, still draws on that history through whisky and brandy notes. The Cocktails Collection sits alongside that line, and unlike The Liquors, none of its three fragrances are built around a single spirit taken neat. Sparkling Royal is the outlier of the three, the one that leans floral throughout instead of settling into a gourmand base like the other two, which makes it the one to test first if a heavy vanilla base isn’t what you’re after.
Sephora carries By Kilian’s existing lines in the UK, including The Liquors collection on sephora.co.uk, and the brand’s UAE shopfront on sephora.me stocks its cognac-inspired scents too. Neither site had The Cocktails Collection listed at the time of writing.
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