MEM - eau de parfum – 2017
Not since Aimè Guerlain created Jicky in 1889 has a perfumer done something so radical to lavender. Antonio Gardoni takes the sunny herb from its kitchen garden setting and passes it through clay, wood, minerals, burned sugar, and wax so that a new form emerges, like steel forged by the elements. MEM contains all the hallmark Bogue signatures but represents a clear step forward in complexity even from the masterpiece that is Maai.
MEM opens up on a dark lavender note that smells less like fresh herbs and more like clay and cepes. Sunshine soon arrives in the form of hops, toasted malt, and the pale ale fizz of aldehydes, lifting the scent out of its humus-rich opening. The scorched-sugar of ethyl maltol caramelizes the lavender, creating a phantom accord of fruit like the dark, almost calcified contents of a forgotten jar of peach marmalade. But as soon as the mind adjusts to this accord, MEM shifts again, this time into a rich floral heart of jasmine, rose, and ylang ylang that sacrifices prettiness for the more interesting facets of wax, gasoline, and rubber. Indian sandalwood with its wheaten milkiness and Himalayan cedarwood with its lingering note of woodsmoke work in tandem to ease the florals and aromatics into the base. The drydown, which is sturdy and beautiful, weaves the sweet dust of unlit incense into the musky, salty, animalic base of a barbershop fougere.
MEM is not a perfume that lends itself to easy interpretation, it will reward your patience a hundred times over. In terms of who can wear it, MEM is something of a chimera: sometimes it seems masculine, at others, feminine. Beautiful, quixotic, and memorable, we think this is artisanal perfumery at its most daring.
“MEM is by far the most complex and ambitious fragrance Antonio Gardoni has composed, and smelling it on a strip is a bit like trying to read a closed book: the sheer density of the fragrance defeats understanding. On the skin, the breeze turns its pages one by one and it becomes readable. MEM is a three-movement thing played by a Parsifal-size 107-piece orchestra: a fresh, camphoraceous lavender-laurel up top that says “Fear not, good people: reassuring spicy-fresh masculine,” and would live a happy life all by itself; immediately behind a huge, unexpected, regal jasmine-rose accord that breathes natural quality; and in the background an animalic drydown in the grand, retro Bogue manner. In terms of balance, texture and sheer symphonic opulence, MEM is in a very rarefied league. A tremendous achievement from any perfumer, all the more so from one who has a day job as an architect.”
MEM review from “PERFUMES, THE GUIDE” by Luca Turin”
