Honey Dragon Memo Paris 2023

You will be deceived from the very first second. The name promises honey, golden and dripping, but when you open the pyramid, there is none. Nowhere. Aliénor Massenet has created a dragon that guards a treasure that officially does not exist. And yet you can smell it. This is not a fragrance; it is a sleight of hand with incense.
The opening crackles: bergamot as a cold spark, then ginger, black pepper, and a hint of thyme, peppery-green, almost like freshly washed skin in candle smoke. Here lies the slightly masculine, clean sharpness that others describe as "herbaceous." But that is just the threshold.
Then the smoke rises. Myrrh and incense drift upwards like veils, Madagascan cinnamon lays itself warmly in between, and suddenly you are no longer in a market but in a stone observatory, in the middle of the night, the incense curling skyward like the body of a sleeping dragon.
And in the dry down, the miracle happens: vanilla absolute, amber, and above all the sweet-balsamic opoponax merge into exactly the impression of honey, without any ever flowing. Warm, resinous, sticky-golden on the skin. The dragon smiles.
Wearable? Unisex, clearly nocturnal, made for the cooler months. The longevity is solid (about seven hours), the sillage polite rather than boastful. In the later stages, it becomes a close-to-skin caresser. The only real tribute this dragon demands is the price. Memo niche remains Memo niche, and that hurts when buying blind.
For me? A little shooting star to wear. You just have to know that the honey is created in the eye of the beholder, not in the bottle.