Max Mara by Max Mara

Majestic and queenly! This citrus blend with ginger makes it an incredible, unique fragrance. I was gifted the first bottle, and I hunted for the second one at any cost. I wish I could get my hands on it again.

I owned this, not once but twice, and the second time it was the largest bottle. That’s when I realised it was marketed as a women’s perfume, yet I always say scents have neither sex nor age if worn with style. To me, this Max Mara was sweet and floral, but not in a feminine way; in fact, many women told me it smelled amazing. What I do remember is that not even God smelled as good as I did, haha.

The girlfriend perfume of 2004. All those citrus-floral scents that were all the rage back then, bottled into a fragrance without personality, without any backbone, without an ID number—a stateless wanderer, and yet, damn it, it smelled wonderful. By 2005, the world seemed like a much more distant place; social media hadn’t yet obsessed us, people still read paper, the 21st century had arrived, yet curiously it felt far less modern than promised. No inkling of any future crisis; the world was running at full power. Everyone drove a Mercedes that left you speechless; every god had a modern flat with a glass shower and a kitchen island. In those days, you were simply lying on your sofa, a fashionable chaise longue, watching a film and eating junk food, while your girlfriend lay across your legs, and a stroke of her mane gifted you a scent of lilies, magnolias, and honeysuckle macerated in citrus and oily musk, with a lingering taste of sexual human skin. If that aroma—so impersonal, flat, monotonous, and fucking addictive—did sin by being too sweet when dry, so what? It smelled of white citrus, erotic flowers, with nuances of both cold and warm talc, spicy and musky. It was one of those soft yet thick mists, at once, with memories of some kind of transparent, dense floral muslin, like a piece of intensely narcotic ozone. This Max Mara is one of those bland perfumes that smelled of death, from the era when sweet scents were bearable, like a version of J’Adore centred on white flowers with a crunchy, unisex twist of ginger. It reminds me of another similar one, V Valentino, which was less sweet and had a lovely cold consistency. That’s about it; a zero on poetry and art, with a certain taste of a catalogue perfume from the time: divine sweet-floral mists in beige and white tones. It also made me think of floral, spicy, fragrant packaging, like lilacs and wisteria, but in golden hues. Bottled glory. Every time I remember it, my mouth waters. I wouldn’t pay a penny more for it. But sometimes the best things are simple, and this was perfect in its only purpose: to smell wonderful.

An elegant, delicious (nothing cheaply sweet), sparkling fragrance that lasts on the skin and has a lovely trail.