Neutral Reviews of MAAI by Bogue Profumo

To me this was a MACHO male scent, and I rarely characterize any scent as gender-specific. I came of perfume age in the blasts of the overblown 1980's.To me this smelled like the skanky too-old guys still at the bar at last call. The initial charred animalistic smokiness almost did me in. It did mellow but the unpleasant almost metallic civit ran the other fainter of heart ambers and florals away leaving a little puff of an old fire pit the morning after camping.

Maai smells expensive and like something produced before allergen regulations. How the oakmoss and civet smell (are?) so real and are used in such quantities, I do not know. The problem to me is that it smells like an imitation of old fragrances rather than a new one. Perhaps I am too susceptible to marketing, image, and stories attached to perfume but wearing this is not nearly as pleasing as wearing actual La Nuit, Montana, Kouros or what have you. It feels incomplete. It has no history. ELDO Rien is a similar old-style opulent chypre but it is its own entity, and its cast of rubber and tar over aldehydic floral make it feel modern rather than a dogmatic imitation of the past. My first thought on smelling Maai was not that it was incredible, but that it smelled uncannily like Marilyn Miglin Pheromone or Charlie. Actually, my first thought was "Aviance Night Musk!" I have never smelled Aviance Night Musk, but Maai smelled like my mental image of Aviance Night Musk, if that makes any sense, something from 1980 that would've been advertised with an image of Dressed to Kill pantyhose legs in heels. It almost has a feminine bowling alley dowdiness to it. It feels bizarre to pay $300 for Marilyn Miglin Pheromone. In ten years if they still make this and all the real chypres are gone, we'll see how I feel. On another note, the perfumer himself, Antonio Gardoni, is very nice to look at. Perhaps if I smelled Maai emanating from his chest hair it would not make me think of Sally Struthers in Five Easy Pieces so much.

I'm neutral on it. This sort of scent is just not my style: rich, opulent, floral. I'm not a fan of tuberose, finding the indolic notes a bit jarring. However, I will concede that this is a well-made, complex scent. I can see why it some would find it beautiful.
It starts with lovely resinous notes in shades of green and brown. I like this phase. The spices pick up very quickly and add a lot of sweet, exotic heft.
Unfortunately for me, the scent just keeps ramping up, up, up. To my taste it gets sweet and dense, heavy and unpleasant. The animalic notes are intriguing and earthy, but they too add to the heaviness.
I had hoped the resinous notes were ameliorate the mix, but they get buried.

MAAI opens as a great, stunningly powerful boozy-animalic-herbal chypre, a sudden jump on the time machine directly among the dirtiest and deepest chypres of the '70s and '80s – so many come to my mind I can't even name one. It's almost basically a prototype of that family of scents: leather, aldehydes, rose, carnation, herbs, castoreum, a slight gourmand undertone comprising earthy nuances of coffee, spices, a powdery-soapy accord with gentle notes of vanilla and chalky aldehydes. Nasty, austere, for virile men and bitchy ladies. Completely unoriginal, though: more than a tribute, or a "revision", or whatever "new version", it smells more like a perfect, impeccable and slightly pedantic copying exercise. It smells unbelievably compelling and "chypre" for real, which shows a great and careful effort in rebuilding notes which today can't be obtained and created "the old way" (like castoreum): still, taking all of this into account and acknowledging the fact that today's niche segment is so depressing it's much better to get this kind of stuff ("copycats of the past") than the rest, I don't get much the point of this scent, also considering the fact it's nice, which shall represent the "high" perfumery, the avant-garde, the élite. Simply because I would get myself an old, "real" skanky chypre, which by the way (aside from the rare and expensive ones) may probably cost quite less than this one, and smell more compelling, rich and "alive". But comparisons or personal choices aside, I admit MAAI smells quite good... for a while, at least. In fact, the other problem of MAAI, especially if compared again to older chypres, is the quality of materials and their duration: on my skin, after less than one hour, practically all the most interesting parts - the animalic, skanky stuff - are gone, and I remain with a generic, soapy-metallic herbal feel, still gloomy but quite toned down and frankly uninteresting. Once the facade collapses, you see it there was no building behind, like in the movies. So... when we'll run out of vintage chypres, I guess this will be the best we will be able to have, and I hope to be dead by then. For the moment, I can't care of MAAI that much.

6,5/10