Diptyque Kyoto Review: A Beetroot Rose in Temple Incense

There is a particular kind of courage in building a luxury fragrance around a root vegetable. Diptyque has never been a house afraid of an odd ingredient — this is, after all, the maison that turned a fig tree, a blackcurrant bud and a tomato leaf into modern classics — but Kyoto, released in 2021 to mark the house's sixtieth anniversary, asks something more of its wearer. It asks you to accept beetroot as a floral material. The result is one of the most genuinely unusual compositions to come out of a major niche house in the last decade. Kyoto is not a pretty fragrance in the conventional sense, and it does not try to be. It is damp, rooty, faintly sweet, faintly metallic, and threaded through with the cool smoke of temple incense. It smells like a garden after rain, and like the inside of a root cellar, and like a rose left on a stone altar. Whether that sounds like a masterpiece or a mistake will depend almost entirely on your tolerance for geosmin — the molecule of wet earth. This review examines Kyoto in full: its place in the Diptyque catalogue, the perfumer behind it, the architecture of its composition, its evolution on skin, its performance, its audience, and its standing in a market where it is now, regrettably, a limited edition.