Noon at Globus Zurich, first floor, and the beauty department has a beautiful centre of gravity: two counters standing side by side, Memo Paris and its more secretive younger sister, Floraïku Paris. Waiting to welcome us was John Molloy, the Irishman who built both maisons with his wife Clara, a glass of something chilled in hand and a story ready for every bottle.
I could have listened to him all afternoon. Somewhere between the neroli and the vanilla we discovered that John shares a birthday with my daughter, one of those small coincidences that makes a conversation feel like a reunion. He had come bearing gifts, too: salt from Menorca, gathered on the island where he and Clara keep a house and spend a good part of the year. The timing was perfect, because Menorca is also the name of Memo Paris’s newest fragrance.
Memo Paris, founded in 2007, has always treated perfume as a form of travel, each scent the memory of a place. Menorca, composed by Sophie Labbé, is that island at first light.
Menorca, Memo Paris
Top: bergamot, lemon, ginger
Heart: neroli, iris, carrot seed
Base: salty musk, mineral notes, sandalwood
It opens bright and sunlit, then settles closer to the skin: neroli warmed by iris and earthy carrot seed, before a salted, mineral musk arrives like seawater drying on the arm after a morning swim. Knowing that John and Clara truly live that landscape of salt flats, dry stone walls and limewashed houses made the scent feel less like a launch and more like an invitation into their summer.
The second house, though, was the one I had really come to understand. Floraïku Paris is the Molloys’ quieter masterpiece. Born in 2017 after a journey to Japan, it takes its name from the haiku, and Clara writes a short poem to accompany every scent. Where Memo carries you across the world, Floraïku slows everything to the pace of a tea ceremony. The collection is organised into three rituals: Enigmatic Flowers, Secret Teas and Spices, and Forbidden Incense.
Each bottle hides inside a lacquered bento box, its sculpted cap lifting away to become a travel spray. John’s years in fashion, including a long chapter at Kenzo, show in this almost obsessive attention to object and gesture, while Clara, who spent a year learning Japanese, gave the house its soul. I had the pleasure of meeting her on another occasion, when she passed through Zurich. You can read about that afternoon at Odéon here.
The fragrance at the heart of the day was Sand and Skin, revisited this season as a Limited Edition.
Sand and Skin Limited Edition, Floraïku Paris
Top: Lysylang and Mahonial (luminous ylang and soft mimosa facets)
Heart: amyris, sandalwood, cedar, patchouli, ylang-ylang
Base: Madagascar vanilla, benzoin, labdanum
Warm, golden and unmistakably sensual, it is Madagascar vanilla and benzoin melting into ylang-ylang, wood and resin, the scent of skin that has spent a whole day in the sun. Here the afternoon closed a beautiful circle.
The artist quietly sketching our portraits, Mauro Carraro from Geneva, is the very illustrator who dressed this Limited Edition, his signature midnight blue and gold leaf drawn into sinuous ropes that move like sand across the cap. To be drawn by the same hand that shaped the bottle, on the day of its Zurich debut, is exactly the kind of detail Floraïku does so beautifully.
We ended where every good story should, upstairs at Roofgarden Globus, lunch above the rooftops of the city, the light long and the conversation unhurried.
Menorca, CHF 275. Sand and Skin Limited Edition, CHF 320. Both now available at the Memo Paris and Floraïku Paris counters, Globus Zurich, Beauty Department, first floor.
LoL, Sandra
Photos: © Sandra Bauknecht and Andrea Monica Hug for Memo Paris
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