DasguteLeben

Better living naturally refers to entrepreneurs who earn a golden nose with it. The Vidal family, owners of Mavive, have become wealthy thanks to Pino Silvestre - the Italian "Tabac Original", a distinctive mass-market fragrance. In addition, the company produces all kinds of fragrances and products at drugstore level and develops unsuccessful perfume lines for fashion brands that, at least internationally, lose themselves in nothing, a little Replay or Pal Zileri. Well, and they thought to themselves sometime: Niche - so pack our stuff into fancy bottles, add a nice story and then take € 100 instead of € 12,50 - we can still do that, wa (is Venetian dialect). And since you reside in the lagoon city, nothing is closer than Murano-like flacons, a replica of Santa Maria Novella Florence as a retail shop and - the most important in the non-industry - two dozen fragrances in no time from the ground stomp. The result is something like Asian Inspirations, which is neither inspiring nor Asian, but classic aroma chemistry from the drawing board - sorry, today it's an algorithm - with a teeny teeny tiny budget and a high price. Souvenir of Venice, running. I smell primarily powder, pepper and green herb notes (probably none of them of course, except the vetiver derivative) quite linear and rather from the bottom drawer - to be honest Mavive can't do anything other than cheap, I'm afraid, that's just burned into the companies DNA. But it lasts a long time, the stuff has to be good, and is diffuse enough that you can project on it what it should be - Thai Curry for example. That this one is 75:25 in women's hands surprises me a little - hard pepper, zero floral, no sweetness. Is it the powder or the more feminine flacon aesthetic? For me, the businessman from Venice is certainly part of the business sector, which tends to spoil my desire for perfume, so I'll probably stick with this attempt.

Ma'ai by Antonio Gardoni's Bogue brand, together with Annette Neuffer's works, is the fragrance that brought me back to the contemporary perfume from which I had cynically resigned myself towards vintage. No coincidence, as Neuffer makes neo-classical natural perfumes in a complex Guerlainesque style and Gardoni has presented Ma'ai, an "animalistic chypre in a space suite", in which great perfume radtion is ingeniously combined with new approaches. My expectations of MEM were accordingly high, especially since Luca Turin gave it 5 stars and defined it as the previous creative highlight in the Bogue portfolio and the Claire Vuckevic with MEM who I hold in high esteem had the same experience as me with Ma'ai.

What am I supposed to say? First of all - it is unacceptable for me, because I neither contract it well nor bear it. Besides nasal itching and coughing, he leaves me aesthetically perplexed: maybe it's scent art, but does anyone want to smell it? I for no price.

It starts off well [what follows is based on notes without knowing the fragrance pyramid]: Lavender, soft, powdery, sweet and pleasant skin odor - creamed female body, a sweet skin area like the neck. This is reminiscent of Ma'ai, as are the white-flowering floral elements that are now coming - full-blooming, flowery, the ylang-jasmine with a minimal faecal note increasingly complemented by "colourful", fruity - I can sense both rose and gammalactone (peach scent). A female body made of lavender and flower blossoms like an arcimboldo or one of the crazy mutations from Alex Garland's bizarre sci-fi drama Annihilation. In any case beautiful and interesting.

Then, after about 10 minutes, it begins to tip over. On the one hand, MEM becomes irritating and slightly prickly, more than just from a charge of aldehydes, and soapy - strongly perfumed liquid cream soap from the drugstore is the association - and in addition there are sweet-maltolige notes. That Turin feels super natural here is confirmed by his statement in a Neuffer review that his nose is no longer accustomed to the fine textures of pure natural substances after years of synthetic smelling. Indeed, Luca. The scent impression of MEM's synthetically inflated science fiction florality is light years away from a Neuffer scent like Sonnett 18 or Stardust. Gardoni loses me here because of the increasingly unpleasant irritation of the respiratory tract and the plastic-sweet thunderstorm of flowers strengthened by maltol, which reminds of the cheapest synthetic neroli-ylang lily of the valley rose etc. from household products and together with the persistent urinary note evokes scent pictures of a freshly cleaned, but due to a long biography of puddles no longer olfactorily sanitizable restaurant toilet. Unlike the erotic animalism of Ma'ai, this is totally repulsive to me.

Another less unappetizing but also not very pleasant odour association is the association with our organic mild detergent which, like many organic products, is "naturally" perfumed - i.e. with highly fractionated isolates of natural fragrances (predominantly floral and citric), which for me do not smell natural at all due to the absence of most secondary and tertiary molecules, but also not like typical fully synthetic monomolecules. I had noticed these substances when testing various Mandy Aftelier perfumes - unpleasantly -; for me they correspond more to the fragrance profile of normal than natural perfumery and therefore have no place in the latter. In MEM, they reinforce the association with functional perfumery, i.e. household products, and this is my sore point at which the aesthetic flap, or guillotine, mercilessly goes down, which is why I can do little with most of Ellena's works for Hermès (Jardin de Drogerie) or Duchaufour's assembly line fruit incense. With Bogue, I didn't expect it like this.

In fact, after some time a clearer jasmine rose profile emerges and I can now better understand the idea of a tripartite perfume - lavender scent - floral bomb - animal stinker - but unfortunately the train has already left and the down thumb of sensual experience here clearly triumphs over intellectual constructs (reference to Jicky etc.). pp.) especially since I actually find nature animalics more interesting in Dominique Dubrana's works, for example, and everything in perfume history to which MEM refers simply smells much better than this postmodern re f/v erenz. MEM is a fragrance experiment, which is praised by experts as a grand perfume and/or grandiose study. According to my nose it fails - but this possibility is in the nature of an experiment, so there is nothing bad about it, apart from the smell.

I have hesitated for a long time with a review of this fragrance, although I am not usually embarrassed by words. The components and their combination have already been explained in detail and I can only supplement my perception here: For me, A Sanctified Rose is primarily an incense scent. Olibanum aspects dominate, but are clearly flanked by the balsamic notes of benzoin, wax, opoponax, etc., which are more and more prominent in the course of the development, again intertwined with wood and vanilla - typical for Annette Neuffer's style, one is seamlessly integrated into the other as in the ornaments of the Alhambra. As Luca Turin writes, texture and structure are one, finely chiselled. The Labdanum plays an important role, but fits seamlessly into the overall picture, instead of standing out as often in perfumes with dark dustiness (aesthetically intended e.g. in Vendetta pour homme, rather clumsy in some House of Matriarch fragrances). So here we are dealing with a really impressive olfactory ornamentation, as one visually knows it from the most noble Persian art and architecture, and one would have to approach it as closely as possible to recognize individual components - which one wouldn't want, however, because the overall picture, which is ultimately what it is all about, is so beautiful to look at. Where is the sacred rose found? It is undoubtedly present, even in the centre of the action, but more as a silhouette resulting from all the interwoven lines and patterns than as a presence of its own. "And if you are the rose, I am a rose shadow" (Sufi Master Rumi). Not a picture, but a (more perfect?) paraphrase, that is the secret of Islamic art. In the contemplation of this deep fragrant beauty, woven from nature and great craftsmanship, like a temple in Samarkand or Isphahan (a place of roses) there are no words missing, as there are no pictures missing, they become superfluous.

In 1892 Vienna was probably the most suitable place to create a lavender rose water: The centre of a disintegrating empire, torn between decadent nostalgia in backward dress and a departure into modernity - five years to the Secession. Perfume has not been eau de cologne, floral bouquet or soliflore for years, and Victorian olfactoryism has been swept away by the splendour of the Belle Époque. As Harry Count Kessler writes in his memoirs:
When I think back to this time of the seventies of my childhood, I think of her in half-faded pictures of beautiful women and their costumes, which today already seem so historical [...] Even the perfumes, which hovered around these phenomena as a light breath, have remained in my memory; perhaps even more clearly than the pale pictures of their beauty. Brise des Îles and Origan, Rose du Soir, Chypre, Souvenir du Réunion - I learned their exotic names later, but the peculiarity that every woman gave them through the smell and the sultriness of her skin I learned to distinguish when I was brought in from the nursery to kiss this or that hand."
Mr. Johann Baptiste Filz could probably trust to find still wealthy buyers for a high-quality water of the old-fashioned sort, even if products like 4711 or ancient lavender were already scents of the petit bourgeoisie and big Eau de Cologne houses like Farina Gegen gegenüber from Cologne already began their slow descent from noble heights into the drugstore shelves. And he succeeded, whether out of his own creativity or with the help of a pharmacopoeia, in creating an excellent composition, simple and perfect. Lavender - tangy, fresh, herbaceous, but also sweetish-green, congenially married with the rose, this fragrant, opulent, sometimes even metallic original perfume - here in a light "yellow-pink" variant with a high linalool content. As my favourite natural perfumer Annette Neuffer once said: "The rose is an indispensable material to add volume to a composition, especially when you're working without synthetics. It smoothes hard edges, rounds off and connects everything." And this is indeed noticeable even in this comparatively simple recipe, in which the rose brings a moment of tension, volume, elegance and ultimately a more interesting harmony than a bouquet of lavender alone could. Truly enchanting, cheerful, but also creamy distinguished, this last fragrance waltz of the old Habsburg, in front of Schönbrunner Yellow, with gala uniforms, before everything sank and, quasi a door away from the perfumery Filz, the modern age unfolded olfactorily, with the most important of all Viennese fragrances, The Knize Ten. Today, in the era de nouveau cologne, one can enjoy it again as contemporary, while Knize Ten probably smells for the average nose to Uropa. Pantha rei.

Whenever Radcliff had picked up his prop, he would go straight to the next Tesco. There he bought four boxes of rum aroma, 3 bottles of vanillin, two pounds of sugar and the cheapest gin and bought an unbearably ambrox-heavy aftershave for £ 2.99 from Boots next door. At home, in his filthy one-room-hole, he mixed everything in an old bucket and began to sing old military songs, fogged by the rising smell. Finally, he put on the worn polyester smoking jacket he had bought from Marks & Sparks years ago. Then he poured the contents of the bucket over his head and body and caught, snorting and wagging his arms, marching through the room, chanting, at some point screaming: I AM THE RIGHT LORD RADCLIFF, I AM THE RIGHT LORD RADCLIFF. As always, the neighbours knocked first, then the police and finally an ambulance came. It would probably be a couple of days back in psychiatric. They already knew "Roaring Radcliff" there well.