When I was wearing bogue Unfiltered 3, I had the sense of shifting scale, shrinking Alice-like until I was insect-sized in a floral forest (with the caterpillars providing the tobacco, smoke, and cryptic chat.)

Unfiltered 9 seems to play a game with time. Like Tom’s Midnight Garden which weaves a lifetime and a single summer into a handful of nights, time unfolds at different rates. You can come and go, but the sun moves at the same daily pace, and the plants keep growing, and the walls still stand. And whether you are there or not, the sap rises, the scents drift, the petals bloom, and the seeds fall. It exists without you. But stay, and the climbers will wrap you in tangles, and the bees will walk dusted feet over you because this garden flourishes on warm skin.

With perfume, we are so used to citrus fizzing brightly and vanishing. But lemons do not stop smelling of lemons twenty minutes after being picked. A bitter orange tree smells like a bitter orange tree all the time. And it does here, all the way until that evening moment when the gold is turning violet, and you are starting to think it’s time to find a jacket if you are staying outside, but don’t want to move and break the spell. It might be a hundred years until you can return.

It’s one of those tangled-time spaces I don’t know if I remember being there, or if I remember dreaming it. Maybe both. Neither. That’s part of the time game: a scent that seems to hold the inexorable passing of each day’s minutes, but lets you live a whole summer in the soft-edged time of dream space.

I am fascinated by how Antonio Gardoni teases so many different forms and ideas from the Bogue building blocks and DNA. I’m taking my time with this Unfiltered sample set, and it’s repaying the concentration. And when I’m not overthinking, I still just smell lovely.

originally posted 11 July 2019