Future Memories by Byredo treads a path familiar to many of us watching the brand over the past few years, in that it gives you just enough wow factor in the first thirty minutes to frog-march you to the cash register before petering out into a synthy mess on your arm once the damage to your wallet has been done.
The opening truly is lovely, with a spiced fruit topnote (no berries to my nose) that recalls a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice mixed with cinnamon and cloves, but an upbeat summer version of what you might be imagining is a Christmassy affair. When this meets the vanilla, it softens into an orange blossom accord redolent of marshmallow fluff stirred through with a fruit cordial of sorts. It almost gets into Love, Don’t be Shy territory, but for a wheaten-biscuit texture pushing through the creaminess that sets it apart. Not a caramelised biscuit – nothing at all like Biscoff – but toasted and grainy, like the roughened surface of a McVities Digestive.
And honestly, it’s the different textures at play in Future Memories that make this really quite attractive at first. The vanilla is that plasticky doughball vanilla that I remember from Gucci Rush and that Gucci brown bottle perfume whose name I can never remember. If you partied in the nineties, you’ll remember this as the scent soundtrack of shiny-vinyl purses and wonder bras and unwise decisions made late at night in dodgy nightclubs.
But thirty minutes on and the only genuinely unwise decision you’ve made, you realise, is falling for the empty promise of this perfume’s hype train. Let me spare you the suspense – Future Memories unravels rather quickly into that cheap feeling, as-glassy-as-a-boiled-sweet amber base that has been consistently stuffed into so many perfumes since Grand Soir. To my nose, this type of ‘amber’ smells more like a room in which broccoli has been boiled than resins or anything even vaguely associated with nature. Hate to see it coming in an otherwise good perfume. It gives me a glimpse of a ghastly emptiness at the core of the perfume, eating away at any soul or imagination it may have initially possessed, like The Nothing from The Neverending Story.
Cover Image: Photo by Shayna Douglas on Unsplash
