Gardelia
Bogue Profumo (2016)

Gardelia from Bogue Profumo, a project commissioned by Profumeria Sacro Cuore to celebrate their 50th anniversary. Another one from the archives and one that is loved by many. And I understand why. This one, very much like AG, is easy to love, and of very high quality and complexity.
As someone who has a deep love and respect for classic vintage perfumes like Mitsouko, and Femme, and someone who loves floral chypres, I have much admiration for this project. Gardelia is yet another powerful example that nowadays one doesn't have to track down vintage bottles from the 50' and the 70' and go through all the troubles this hunt involves. I did, but I was lucky and found a few that were properly stored. Unfortunately, most of the time, this is not the case. Perfumes like Gardelia, MAAI (older versions especially), Enlevement au Serail (the first version), Casablanca, Une Fleur de Cassie, Diaghilev, Mayura, Salome, and several others prove that those vintage titans of this genre can be reproduced and most of the time, bettered.
Gardelia takes inspiration from a fruity-floral-chypre like Mitsouko and is built on the same structure as MAAI but with higher quality ingredients and few adaptations. The parallel with vintage MAAI is unquestionable. They feel most related in the base, as Gardelia presents different textures and facets for the first two stages. The opening is reminiscent of Mitsouko with the peach accord, but the note feels more nuanced and finely tuned here. The peach feels almost overly ripe to the point where it defuses a boozy quality and a dewy, moist texture. And yet somehow it doesn't feel heavy or syrupy, rather airy. An extraordinary feat indeed. This opening leads to the hearth dominated by white florals. It is a lush and huge floral bouquet where it is difficult to break the notes apart, and I feel the gardenia gets lost within it, as it doesn't smell like a gardenia-dominant composition. It is buttery, slightly indolic, fleshy almost. The base construction is built around civet, resins, and moss, with a strong emphasis on the first two, coming across as feral and warm, maybe a tad smoky. The longer it lingers on the skin the more it transitions toward a musky-resinous affair that I can't get enough of. Again, just like with AG, these transitions overlap so that the accords experienced in the previous stage mingle with the ones unveiled in the present one.
A grandiose, terribly high-quality floral chypre that in my opinion, improves on the classics while also bringing a clear touch of modernity into the picture.

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Genre: Floral/Chypre

Anyone expecting a gardenia fragrance out of this is going to be mighty disappointed. (See Jovoy's Gardez-Moi or Dusita's Melodie de l'Amour instead.) In fact, I think Antonio Gardoni did disservice to himself and to this fragrance by mentioning gardenia in the press materials. Dismiss any thought of gardenia, and you can enjoy this scent as a big, dense, abstract white flower bouquet set atop the kind of weirdly medicinal-yet-animalic foundation that Gardoni has come to specialize in.

To some extent, this smells to me like an exploration of the same territory where Gardoni unearthed MAAI. There are references aplenty to the great old-school chypres, but with a sharply-honed edge that leaves the composition smelling unmistakably modern. Gardelia is noticeably cleaner-smelling than MAAI, if no less weighty, and more obviously floral, too boot, but the family resemblance can't be denied. This stuff tends to wear me more than I wear it, but I enjoy it nonetheless.