Bogue Profumo OOOH illustration by Massimo Alfaioli

When is the last time you inhaled a fragrance, your eyes widened, and you involuntarily sighed? And then wished to relive the experience forever? The aptly-named OOOH from Bogue Profumo, commission in celebration of CaFleureBon’s tenth anniversary, elicited that reaction from me as soon as it opened on my skin. It is a kaleidoscope of mimosa, rose, citrus, and resins that is pollenous, grassy, herbal, a bouquet of fantastical Marc Chagall flowers pouring from yellow skies on a pale day.

Antonio Gardoni

Bogue Profumo OOOH was created for CaFleureBon’s 10th anniversary. It is the culmination of a year-long, four-way collaboration between CaFleureBon Editor-in-Chief Michelyn Camen (creative director), former CaFleureBon editor, essayist and photographer Alex C. Musgrave (photography), artist Massimo Alfaioli (packaging illustrations) and Antonio Gardoni (perfumer and bottle designer). Antonio Gardoni, founder and nose of Bogue Profumo, imbues intellectualism with a profound understanding of how art forms overlap and syncopate with each other like steps in a classical ballet danced to modernist music. Think of the way he makes waves of vetiver, weaving like seagrass in Berceuse’s Allegretto 7.2 seem to mimic the instrumental patterns of the second movement of Beethoven’s 7^th. Or how MEM’s four lavenders manage to separate and merge so that you smell each distinctly at different times before they merge with sensual honeyed, smoky and animalic notes, as if lavender was a play with four acts that ended rather than began with a seduction. With OOOH, Gardoni creates an microworld of flowers, plants and resins around mimosa.  Notes emerge like watercolour spreading on thick paper, overlapping and creating new colours as they do.

In the Land of the Gods, Daphnis and Chloe by Marc Chagall

I was struck by Gardoni’s description of his concept for OOOH – perfume as ghost or a mirage, a vision of what is not there, a cast of memory on an empty backdrop. He fashioned the perfume around an idea of dust – not just in the literal sense of a traveled road, but the residue smells of what was or might have been. Mimosa becomes pollen and fluff blown across an ancient field. Rose returns to the greenness of its origins of stem and root. Herbal aromas that have parched in a strong sun marry with dried lavender, jugged, rooty vetiver and yesterday’s citrus rind. And over it all is a chiffon veil of incense. Everything is in past tense, even the aldehydes, whose glitter is muted to shimmer.

Bogue Profumo OOOH bottle designed by Antonio Gardoni

There are as many ingredients in OOOH as in the original Opium, and, like that great fragrance, OOOH walks a similar tightrope between balancing and delineating myriad notes. But where Opium is dense and hedonistic, dazzling with its jeweled tiara of notes, OOOH is a fragrance whose opacity comes from gauzy layers of scent, each layer peeling away to reveal another. The first spray tells me this is one of Gardoni’s creations: a deeply purple lavender, benzoin and pollen buzz about each other like drowsy insects. There’s an impression of honey, a huge puff of mandarin and bergamot, a profusion of herbs and a soft hum of aldehydes. Rose smells fully of the blossom for a moment before it blows away to reveal the powdery, sweet ash of mimosa. When the rose reappears, it is greener, stemmier, younger. It’s as if I walked from a summer garden backward into springtime.

Commemorative packaging design by Massimo Alfaioli

The honeyed lavender of the opening hovers throughout OOOH’s development, apparent more so one moment than the next. In the middle stages, the mimosa blooms fully and hangs in the air as the aldehydes hold it aloft. There’s an herbal, almost branchy dryness that crackles through now, a loamy hint of Java vetiver and patchouli, followed immediately by the slight petrol whiff of Haitian vetiver. The various notes are in full profusion now, working together in a symphony of flowers, plants, resins and citrus juice. I can almost hear what I’m smelling.

Photo by Alex C. Musgrave

It is only when the music dies down that I find the incense, extending quiet tendrils around some refined sandalwood. Here, in the final stages of OOOH’s trajectory, Gardoni’s ghost floats into view. The incense is light but gives the illusion of an overlay of dust scattered across the plants, resins and fruit. There is a fleeting quality to the fragrance which has nothing to do with how long it wears. It comes from the way notes appear and then become echoes of themselves as other notes move past them. Only ten bottles of Bogue Profumi OOOH were made; its beauty, like the flowers and grasses of which it is made, is ephemeral. Knowing its loveliness is here for only a short while etches this fragrance into a gorgeous, if poignant, memory.

Notes: Petitgrain mandarin, petitgrain bigarade, bergamot furocumarine free, vetiver Haiti, aldehydes, vetiver Sri Lanka, lavandin grosso, lavender absolute 100%, ylang ylang extra, benzoin Siam, benzoin Sumatra, cypress Spain, cypress blau Australia, atlas cedarwood, geranium bourbon, rose absolute 100% Bulgaria, rose absolute 100%, Afghanistan, vanilla absolute bourbon 100%, bitter orange, jasmin absolute 100%, jasmine sambac absolute 100%, mimosa absolute 100%, patchouli, tonka bean absolute 100%, myrrh, white grapefruit, olibanum Somalia, olibanum India, juniper berry, sandalwood, neroli.

Disclaimer: Bottle of OOOH beyond generously given to me by Bogue Profumo. My opinions are my own.

Lauryn Beer, Senior Editor

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Samples of OOOH are available at Luckyscent. While the 6 bottles of this very limited edition sold out within minutes, and there is a Luckyscent auction. The auction is live until Friday, April 10, at 5:48 DST (check auction for exact time). All proceeds from Luckyscent’s auctionwill be donated to Fondazione comunita bresciana onlu, a hospital in Brescia, Italy, Antonio’s home town. Antonio sold his archival bottle of Bogue OOOH to a collector for 3.8000 and the proceeds will be wired directly to Fondazione comunita bresciana onlus.  

Photo by Michelyn

Thanks to the generosity of Bogue Profumo and Editor-in-Chief Michelyn Camen, we have one 8 ml decant of OOOH for one registered reader in the U.S. You must be registered or your comment will not count. To be eligible, please leave a comment giving us your impressions of Bogue Profumo OOOH based on Lauryn’s review. Draw closes 4/11/2020.

Dear readers: We encourage everyone with the means to donate either money or time to your local hospitals, (Carlos Huber of Arqusite delivered lunch yesterday for over 200 healthcare workers at New York’s NYU Langone Kimmel Pavillion @arquiste on Instagram), homeless shelters, give blood and please support your local small businesses, including independent perfumers and boutiques.

When at all possible PLEASE STAY AT HOME.

COVID-19, although devastating our world can unite us. It will not defeat us –Michelyn Camen, Editor-in Chief ( I auctioned my archival bottle through Luckyscent which sold for $870.00, the proceeds went to Mount Sinai Hospital in NYC.

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