Mémoire d'une Odeur 
Gucci (2019)

Making art about art is high-stakes business. How else to take this odd charming thing's name? "Memory of an odor" smacks of nostalgia, triggers that writerly instinct to trot out the word 'Proustian'. And indeed the perfume is lovely, and feels grounded in some hazy past. Its chamomile is cheerful and fresh, folding in neatly with a generalized musk and vanilla flung distantly into the background. Jasmine straddles both categories, adding warmth & sweetness, but also a translucent celadon tone likewise enhanced by a certain woodiness in the dry-down.

Fortunately, the smell is as transportive as you'd hope. It is the smell of wistfulness for a time that never was. Memoire is also deeply hybridized, not fitting neatly into any of the usual check-boxes we all use to categorize an otherwise ineffable sensory impression. Though in the hopes of being understood, I will employ said checkboxes for our mutual benefit, dear reader. Memoire d'une Odeur is more-or-less a fragrance that is unisex, has soft sillage, and sits close to everyone's collective imaginations of those catch-all descriptors: sweet, ambery, fresh, floral, musky, herbacious, woody. Very smart, impossibly timely but worldly, old, and sad at the same time. Very much a gestalt: rather more than the sum of its parts, which seem plain when rendered in hobbyist scrawl as I've resorted to here.

I was pleasantly surprised by this perfume! At first sniff it comes off a bit powdery, but then it morphs into this lovely watery smell. Not aquatic like an ocean, but a little hay-sweet and slightly chlorinated. Like walking in a damp cave. Great scent for summer (and I've started spraying it on my linens to help me cool down in this horrible heat before bedtime!) I think it leans slightly feminine, but I would love to smell this on anyone! When I spray it on myself I unfortunately become a bit nose blind to it, but when I spray it in my pillows or blankets, I instantly smell it in the air. So I stick to spraying this on my clothes when I wear it. Would definitely recommend to anyone looking for that elusive water/chlorine smell!

TLDR: Good (3/5). A somewhat feminine-leaning unisex scent with minimal projection but an overall interesting fragrance.

I bought this fragrance without spraying it on skin at DXB duty-free. On paper, this scent lights up, projects with mighty heft and smells interestingly indolic because of the way the jasmine and the camomile play together. from a blotter, this is an unusual composition that succeeds in evoking a moment in time by being plaintive and smelling ever so slightly dated. I rather liked this scent during my first encounter with it.

On skin, it is like a different product than what one smells on paper. Projection is minimal, sillage nonexistent and the scent is rather damp and flat in the opening. The mid notes are quite floral and probably read as feminine to most noses. The base, which is hardly perceptible on skin, has a vaguely Guerlain-esque woody, vanillic musky note when smelled from about a millimetre above the point where the spray was applied.

While I am not normally one to spray my clothes, my approach with Md'UO is to spray on skin and then spray a diffuse cloud onto my shirt. In this way, the experience is rather more like the way the fragrance smells off paper. The high-quality atomizer makes this routine easy. Used in this way, this fragrance is rather like the CdG Odeur scents (53 & 71), not in the way they smell, but in the way the combination of notes captures an image of a time and place. This is interesting conceptual perfume compounding and I salute Gucci for bringing something so far outside the mainstream to market. Gucci seems to have developed a penchant for occasionally releasing such scents as further evidenced by Hortus Sanitatis, the 2020 limited release in their Alchemist's Garden line.

I rarely wear this scent, because I don't really know for what situations it is suited. However, I can see from the level in my bottle that my wife likes it and uses it more than I do.

my wife's appreciation of this fragrance notwithstanding, I find this scent unisex. I am, however, a big fan of No. 19, Jicky, and other scents that might be said to tilt to the feminine side of unisex. Perhaps being a tall, burly, bearded comfortably and unambiguously cis-het male makes me less concerned that someone might think my cologne smells feminine. be that as it may, what I am sure is that Md'UO doesn't smell 'girly' or fey, even if it has some elements that are associated with female-targeted fragrances when they are blended as they are here.

The bottle is quite nicely styled and gender neutral.

So for me, this scent gets a rather tepid thumbs-up. DEFINITELY not one to blind buy and not an easy scent to find occasions to wear. Test on skin before deciding on this fragrance. Still, I do not regret buying this scent.