Noun
Bogue Profumo × LuckyScent (2018)

BOGUE Profumo, NOUN.

NOUN was a limited-release launched to celebrate Luckyscent's 15th anniversary. I must say that at first, I wasn't crazy about it. Not at all. But as with almost all of Antonio's works, except AG and Gardelia, I had to sit down and have a chat with them to get to know each other. Every time I wore NOUN, I discovered new facets, new colors, and textures. At this point, NOUN is a top 3 BOGUE perfume for me, next to AG and Gardelia.

NOUN is all about strong contrasts. A game of cold and warm. But also a game of textures, fizzy and creamy. Personally, I love strong contrasts in perfumes more than anything else. It is also a savory perfume. I would not call it a gourmand by any means, more like an anti-gourmand, but savory nonetheless.
I'd say the perfume presents as two distinct phases, overlapping in the middle, with a smooth transition between them.
At first, you get the cold phase of the perfume. A blast of kitchen herbs and spices all seen through a thick cloud of olibanum smoke. The spices don't feel warm. Nor the aromatics. Mustard seeds, pepper, clove, rosemary, and lots of basil. Lavender is also present here, giving support to the other aromatics. The smoke here is unlike his other works, it feels like cold churchy frankincense smoke. There's also a meat accord here, that plays peek-a-boo. But it smells more like raw, seasoned meats, rather than cooked meats.
In the second stage, the perfume starts to warm up. Exotic florals, ylang-ylang, jasmine, and resins such as benzoin, styrax, as well as vetiver provide the ground for the base of the perfume. The resins and the ylang-ylang sweeten up the perfume and they help to create a creamy, buttery accord, with a sweet vanillic undertone. It almost feels like vanilla-flavored butter biscuits. And so the culinary theme perpetuates, to finally settle down to this sweet benzoin base supported by some woods. The Gardoni signature elements are present all over the perfume. The ylang-ylang, the lavender, the rosemary, the benzoin, the vetiver. It feels like a Gardoni through and through yet it smells unlike any other.

Another way I like to picture this perfume, in a more satyrical view, is by imagining this picnic party at a church in the Italian countryside. All the clergy gathered around, having a barbecue in the courtyard, smoking meats, and eating vanilla-flavored butter cookies. The smell of burning frankincense wafts from inside the church into the courtyard, mixing with the scent of seasoned meats and kitchen herbs.

IG:@memory.of.scents

Noun is my first try from Bogue, and as an exclusive Luckyscent release to celebrate the boutique's fifteenth anniversary, it's a particularly daring entry.

It's a gourmand, but not a sweet one, as Sebastian Jara notes, its particular ensemble of green, woody, and spicy notes conjuring spicy vegetables and meat to my nose.

Mostly, the spicieness stands out with an undercurrent of resins to render the blend slightly creamy and at the same time still a bit animalic.

In the dry down, I get more of the floral/herbal side of it, the lavender in particular, and it smells a bit more like a traditional men's fragrance.

Performance is strong, but it comes pricey, at $210 for 50ml, so one really needs to love the stuff to splurge for it.

7 out of 10

Noun starts with the scratchiness, the hint of dissonance that I love in Antonio Gardoni's perfumes. His perfumes are built for the long haul, unfolding slowly over the course of the day. Like traditional extraits they aren't meant to be judged at the first sniff where they can appear so potent as to be aggressive.

Fruit marks the transition to the perfumes heart. The citrus transforms into an almost grape-like note that creates a flinty whiff of white wine. Noun turns jammy but never actually grows sweet. Noun's fruit--what I perceive as jamminess and the mineral hint of white wine (you might characterize it differently)--hovers beside the perfume's central woody-floral core, as though sensed through the olfactory equivalent of peripheral vision. The hint of grape highlights the perfume's floral quality similarly to the way Dior Poison and Caron Narcisse Noir famously amped their white floral bouquets with methyl anthranilate, a material that can give a concord grape, bubble-gummy flavor to tuberose and orange blossom. In Noun, the effect is much more subtle and the hint of grape gives the woody-floral heart a smooth glow.

It doesn't take long to recognize the importance of patchouli in Noun. Over the course of hours, the balance of flowers-to-woods tips in favor of the woods that ultimately define the perfume. Gardoni's perfumes tend to shine in dry down, where precise layering of resinous materials give the perfumes impressive coherence and Noun is no exception. The emphasis on patchouli's camphorous side gives Noun's drydown a cool vibe that differentiates it from the warm basenotes of Maai.

On first wearing Noun, I was struck by how prominent the Bogue-identifiers are. The salty/musky balance and the pattern of the white florals in particular are familiar. The question Noun must answer is: Is it just a different flavor of a 'house accord' that Gardoni has shown before? My answer is no, but I suspect that Gardoni has beaten me to the punch and answered the question already. Noun's topnote will be instantly identifiable to wearers of Maai and Aeon 001, but despite the 'signature style' of the opening, the perfume avoids predictability. Gardoni puts his distinctive mark on the perfume's topnote–almost a taunt–then retracts it as the perfume dives deep into the patchouli.

All artists must watch their work closely over time to avoid repeating themselves. Gardoni's perfumes reiterate themes within a specific genre. Still, I wouldn't rebuke a classical composer for not creating a jazz piece and I don't fault Gardoni for making woody-floral perfumes, especially when he continues to find new patterns and ideas in his work. In fact, I would argue that as he continues to explore the resinous woody-floral range, Gardoni's work becomes more personal. Noun and MEM, which preceded it, are particularly strong efforts and demonstrate Gardoni's ability to mine a concept for different configurations that produce novel results.

(exerpted from scenthurdle.com)