MEM (2017)
by Bogue Profumo

BOGUE – MEM (2017)

With its 23 notes, MEM looks daunting on the page and one expects a jumble of olfactory sensations. The reality is quite different.

Initially I detect a beautiful tuberose, though it is not listed as a note. This is perhaps an overdose of Ylang. This is quickly followed in succession by lavender, peppermint and vanilla. So far fresh and uplifting, with that rich creamy ylang/tuberose hovering over all.

Five minutes in the civet appears, a quiet restrained civet, along with the musk and castoreum, thus providing a new, warm, animalic base for the creamy florals and crisp lavender/peppermint to dance upon.

The blending is stellar. One gets the impression of a Guerlain from the 1930s or 1940s. It’s that well done.

Into the dry down we are in Jicky territory – lavender and vanilla, but the brightness of the peppermint is still present in the background.

MEM is a true surprise in this modern perfume world of chemical and synthetic ingredients. It all smells “real” and it smells well thought out, both rarities nowadays. Highly recommended for those into vintage scents. The price tag is daunting, but this is one of the very few highly priced items that may just be worth the investment.

Antonio Gardoni is the most talented perfumer on earth and this is his Magnum Opus. An absolute treatise on Lavender. Herbal, sweet, floral, fresh, warm... Bogue makes holographic future florals for the next century.

If I had to choose one fragrance to wear for the rest of my days, it would be MeM. Pure happiness.

MEM leads off with an excellent billowing lavender, the kind that lets in nostril-clearing eucalyptus-like notes and gummier licorice into its usual soap-and-metal charge. This feels like fields upon fields of the stuff and it’s probably the first time it has truly excited me in perfumery (by contrast, lavender for real I find plenty exciting). Walk back into a room where you have been sitting – and there is that lavender, impossibly vital, a touch camphoraceous, fresh as a breeze. The citruses in the opening have been beautifully deployed to pair with the lavender – the bitter peel effects merging perfectly into the medicinal edge of its profile.
Hereafter, MEM diverges somewhat – on paper it had promised brassy, fat and dirty jasmine as the floral entertainment but on my skin the florals were muted subsuming themselves in the development of the lavender main theme. Bubbles of olfactory sensations keep popping – the brightness of something minty, suggestions of caramel and burnt sugar, malty comfort. So, yes, MEM is complex as has often been noted – but it’s a complexity within a clearly articulated theme. As for the animalic elements, nothing really wagged its tail at me – whatever is in here is kept well within the bounds of decency. What I appreciate most about MEM is how it zigzags between field-fresh lavender, medicine chest and grand classical perfumery of layers upon layers without any dizziness.
However, wonders be, much, much later in the day, almost without my noticing it, there was the jasmine, with not a single clean thought on its mind, doing unspeakable things with an ever-so-willing musk. The lavender was now taking a back seat, but enjoying the view, so to speak.

Genre: Fougère

Words fail.

Antonio Gardoni has taken what smelled to me like a shot at a fougère before (O/E, to be precise), but this is something else entirely. To say that MEM is about lavender is a bit like saying that Picasso’s Guernica is a picture of a bull. To belabor the metaphor, Gardoni, true architect that he is, deconstructs and reassembles the lavender in MEM to reveal an entirely new, and heretofore unimagined form.

In a pathetically inadequate and incomplete attempt at analysis, I’ll venture that part of Gardoni’s genius here was to pull hard on a couple of lavender’s loose strands. As Vero Kern had once before with her magnificent Kiki, Gardoni accentuates the weird, carmel-like facet that emerges in some lavender materials. Yet at the same time, he also highlights the bitter edge that makes lavender so thoroughly unpalatable when, in the now-fashionable manner, it is baked into shortbread cookies. (Sorry, but I’d rather eat ashes.) This, among many other things, takes place over the kind of deeply saturated medicinal/animalic background that has become a Gardoni trademark (q.v. MAAI, Gardelia, or Aeon 001.)

I will stop now, because I can’t begin to do MEM justice, but know that it’s scents like this that restore my faith in olfactory creativity.

A heavier Jicky minus the vanilla plus the medicine.