Le Lion de Chanel - Shalimar's Dark Mirror
"A Chanel release is exciting. A Les Exclusifs release, in perfume circles, is the Olympics."
A note from the author: Hello all, I’m still unfortunately without internet so for this week’s newsletter I have pulled across an article I originally wrote on Medium in 2021. This was my first longform fragrance article so I thought it fitting to republish on Substack and make a single source of truth for my writing. For those who have read it previously, my apologies - I hope to be back to regular posting next week. M
LE LION DE CHANEL - SHALIMAR’S DARK MIRROR
The house of Chanel has released a new perfume. It is called Le Lion de Chanel.
Olivier Polge, Chanel’s in-house perfumer and the creator of Le Lion, describes the perfume as “opulent, deep and radiant. We refined an essence of cistus labdanum to concentrate its effects and intensify its velvety and leather facets, and I used an infusion of vanilla from Madagascar, made in-house with exceptional beans. These two ingredients contribute to the sophistication of the fragrance and are what render it inimitable.”
The notes for the perfume according to Chanel are bergamot, lemon, labdanum, amber, vanilla, patchouli, sandalwood, and musk.
Perfume acts as a kind of social history. It acts as personal history, of course — you never forget the perfume your mother wore or the cheap scent you threw on in high school - but it also defines decades, acting as a strange brew that can immediately throw you back in time with one sniff. Run Poison (Dior, 1985) under the nose of anyone alive in the 80’s and you’ll see what I mean.
The defining scents of the 2010’s are Portrait of a Lady (Frederic Malle, 2010), Aventus (Creed, 2010), Santal 33 (Le Labo, 2011), and Baccarat Rouge 540 (Maison Francis Kurkdjian, 2015). But what about our great global nightmare, the beginning of the 2020s? What scent is going to define this time of ours in the furnace?
It might just be Le Lion.
PART 1 — THE CULT OF CHANEL
In bookstores now, the children’s section is full of stories about women from the past. Remarkable women, trailblazing women, working women. There’s Harriet Tubman, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Frida Kahlo, Joan of Arc. There’s even a little book about Coco Chanel.
The first time I saw this book I did a double take. Could this be real? Was someone trying to sell Coco Chanel as a role model for little girls? The campaign to make the world forget Chanel was a Nazi is surely one of the great corporate successes of the past century.
It’s not like there is nothing admirable in Gabrielle Chanel’s story. She carved a space for herself in an industry dominated by men. She built herself up from nothing. It was only the antisemitism, you see, the collaborating with the Nazis, that spoils it all. The only reason Chanel was not convicted as a collaborator by the French was that her old friend, one Winston Churchill, stepped in to save her.
Chanel’s business partner was a man named Pierre Wertheimer. A Jewish man, he saw Chanel’s antisemitism and the rise of Nazism in Europe and wisely left for America, leaving control of his part of the company in the hands of a Christian businessman, Félix Amiot. When the Nazis invaded France, Chanel tried to use Aryan law to wrest control of the company from her Jewish business partner and was bitterly disappointed when she couldn’t.
When the war ended Wertheimer returned to France and to his company, and in what is one of the greatest cases of schadenfreude in history took control of Chanel from Chanel.
Despite this, Chanel continued to work with the Wertheimers until her death in 1971. The relaunch of the brand in 1954 was a huge hit, especially in the American market. As Hal Vaughan, author of Sleeping With the Enemy: Coco Chanel’s Secret War, pointed out:
“From the point of view of the Wertheimers, the decision was extremely logical. What they were doing is not buying a business but rather an empire for a lifetime, and indeed that’s what it’s been. Can you go to any major city without seeing a Chanel store? It’s a unique mark in the world today.”
Chanel was the brand. Chanel is the brand. For Chanel to be successful for the Wertheimers, they cannot have people walking around talking about how its namesake was a Nazi.
The problem with Coco Chanel’s legacy is that she gave her company her name and robbed herself of humanity. No longer can she be Gabrielle, with virtues and faults and flaws, three dimensional and real and a Nazi — now she is forever Chanel. And the word Chanel means elegance, must continue to mean elegance, because if it stopped meaning elegance and started meaning Nazi no one would buy the shoes or the handbags, and no one, no one, no one would buy the perfume.
The place that Chanel holds in the world of perfume is unmatched. There is simply no other house with the legacy of Chanel. When №5 debuted in 1921, the greatest perfume house was run by the father of modern perfumery François Coty (also a flagrant antisemite). His competitor was the house of Guerlain, the house of Jicky and L’Heure Bleue. In the early 20th century, Francois Coty would create entirely new genres of perfume and Jacques Guerlain would take them and tweak them into masterpieces. There was almost a conversation between them, Coty speaking and Guerlain replying. Coty made Chypre; Guerlain made Mitsouko. Coty made Emeraude; Guerlain made Shalimar.
Chanel wanted none of that. Chanel wanted her own perfume style, something new, something different. She got it. Chandler Burr writes in The Perfect Scent of a perfume the industry calls, “le monstre. Chanel’s Chanel №5. Here was a ninety-year-old fragrance always at the top of the international bestseller lists, an institution whose 2003 sales had been an astonishing €180 million.” ¹
It is the reputation of №5, the way it has been carried like the most delicate of golden swans from decade to decade by the in-house perfumers at Chanel to its modern form, that has made it legendary. №5 is the perfumed ship of Theseus — if all the ingredients have been changed, substituted, syntheticised, is it still №5? No doubt the perfume Ernest Beaux presented in his numbered vial was entirely different to the one Marilyn Monroe wore to bed, and both of them different to the one on shelves now. It still sells. It will always sell. That’s all that matters.
The rest of Chanel’s perfumes are rooms in the house that №5 built. All Chanel perfumes are inspired in some way by Coco Chanel’s life. It is a Mobius strip, a continuum that folds back on itself and leads always back to Coco.
Coco and Gabrielle are self explanatory. But there is also 1932, named for the first collection of jewelry Coco Chanel debuted in that year; 31 Rue de Cambon, the address of Coco Chanel’s apartment; Beige, named after the Chanel quote, “I take refuge in beige because it’s natural”; Boy, named for Chanel’s lover Boy Capel; Misia, named for Chanel’s friend Misia Sert; Coromandel, “inspired by the exquisite Chinese lacquer screens that lined Mademoiselle Chanel’s apartments”; La Pausa, for Coco Chanel’s summer house.
One can imagine an in-house historian at Chanel who works alongside the perfumers and couturiers tasked with digging up some reference, no matter how obscure, from Chanel’s life to inspire the newest campaign. Just skip over those few years dining at the Hotel Ritz with SS-Oberführer Walter Schellenberg, s’il vous plaît.
It’s hard to know how to feel about this. On one hand, you want the Wertheimers to keep profiting off the Chanel name forever, a form of reparations; on the other, people keep making picture books for children about a Nazi. Can you divorce a company from the person who founded it when the company bears their name? The paradox is constant: Chanel was a Nazi, but we cannot let anyone know it, because our business is Chanel.
And what of Le Lion? Coco Chanel was deeply superstitious. Coco Chanel was a Leo. She took the lion as her personal symbol, and had lion statues in her house. There’s also something in the press release about lions being the symbol for Venice, a city Chanel loved, but I think we can all give the in-house historian at Chanel a break and tell them that they’ve already met the brief and need not go further. Chanel was a Leo. Voila, Le Lion de Chanel.
PART 2 — A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE IN-HOUSE PERFUMER
There have only been four perfumers in the entire history of Chanel.
№5 was released a hundred years ago. It was created by Ernest Beaux, a French-Russian perfumer who fled the revolution and famously presented his formulas to Coco Chanel with numbered labels. She chose the rose-iris with sandalwood in the base and an overdose of soapy aldehydes in the top. Beaux also created №22 (1922), Cuir de Russie (1924), and Bois des Iles (1926).
After Ernest Beaux came Henri Robert, who had worked for Coty and took over at Chanel in 1952. This was the golden age of post war perfumery, when Germaine Cellier was slinging out Fracas and Bandit and Vent Vert, when Edmond Roudnitska was over at Dior making Diorissimo and Eau Sauvage, when Estee Lauder was smashing bottles of Youth Dew in department stores on Fifth Avenue. Robert made Chanel’s first masculine, Pour Monsieur (1955), and then №19 (1970) and Cristalle (1974), both brutal green scents.
After Robert came Jacques Polge, who ran Chanel for 37 years. Born in Avignon, apprenticed at Givaudan, he is the quintessential perfumer — and in the grand tradition of French perfume running in the family, his son Olivier followed him into the business. Jacques made Antaeus (1981) and Egoiste (1990). He released Coco (1984) to keep up with Opium (YSL, 1977) and then Coco Mademoiselle (2001) to keep up with Angel (Thierry Mugler, 1992). Perfumery was entering the era of flankers, and Chanel was not immune — little by little its reputation for quality was being squandered on Allure Homme Sports and Chance eau Tendres.
Chanel, home of le monstre, almost universally agreed to have the finest catalogue of fragrances of any house, was worried. They had been behind the curve in the 90’s — Chanel was not going to release a version of L’eau d’Issey (Issey Miyake, 1992) or CKOne (Calvin Klein, 1994). Regulation of ingredients was getting more and more restrictive. But worse than all of this: companies were getting eaten.
There are three leviathans sitting at the center of the beauty industry, looking outwards, constantly sniffing for blood. They are called Esteé Lauder, L’Oreal, and Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton. There are start up companies, many of them perfume houses, whose entire raison d’etre is to be bought out by one of these conglomerates.
Where was the old guard? Coty had become a conglomerate itself, managing perfume releases for celebrities and smaller brands. And Guerlain, that great French house, that family owned business, had sold to LVMH in 1994.
It is not an exaggeration to say that of the classic perfume houses, Chanel is the last independently owned French juggernaut. (Hermès have also slipped the noose, but Hermès will never have a legacy like Chanel’s when it comes to perfumery, no matter how many Hermessences they deploy). Every single one of Chanel’s competitors, those other brands ensconced in their booths at the department store, are owned by conglomerates.
There is an arrogance to Chanel that says they like it that way. They alone are independent. They are l’éxéption.
There was another phenomenon happening to perfume at the turn of the millennium that was threatening Chanel: the rise of niche. A niche perfume house is a company that solely makes perfumes or perfumed products (compared to designers, who also sell clothes or makeup). They’re ubiquitous now — Frederic Malle, Byredo, Le Labo — and they too have been conglomerated by Esteé and her friends. The niche house aims to release scents that are avant garde (for the more adventurous sniffer) and wildly expensive (for the snob). Niche perfumery is for the urbanite who has decided that since Chanel and Dior are available behind the counter at every department store in every suburb in the world they are no longer the smell of the Ninth Arrondissement but the smell of the strip mall, eau de bourgeoisie.
Niche houses were clever. They only sold their products in the big cities, the small boutiques, and though they predated Instagram they had predicted its culture — the rarer perfume is the more coveted; buzz is better advertising than advertising. Niche houses understood that when you sell a perfume you are selling the idea of who the buyer wants to be.
But the designer brands and their overlords had found a response to niche: in-house lines that would be exorbitantly priced and geographically scarce, with scents that were unique, daring, luxurious - everything the display in the department store was not. So came Dior Priveé, Armani Privé, Guerlain L’Art et la Matière, and Les Exclusifs de Chanel.
Perfumery is an oddly structured business. ‘Perfume’, Chandler Burr writes, ‘is the only remaining truly French-dominated international industry, and because it is French, the industry is virulently insular, pathologically paranoid, and archaically secretive.’ ²
Here’s how a perfume gets made. The vast majority of brands will send a brief out to the big fragrance firms — Givaudan, Firmenich, IFF, Symrise. These are the companies who source the materials for perfume, have research labs to discover and patent synthetic molecules for perfume, and who train and hire perfumers to make perfume. They compete for a brief, and if they win the contract, they are paid by the perfume house for the raw materials they provide. The perfumer does not get paid beyond his salary working for the company. Nobody gets paid unless the company wins the brief.
Perfume is made in a lab by a perfumer with a squad of assistants in scrubby white buildings in Geneva and Paris and New York. This is why perfumery is such a cloak and dagger business, why there are people like Tom Ford and anyone with the last name Creed who want you to think they are actually standing in front of a perfume organ with a fan of blotters making tinctures and blending accords like some kind of apothecary in a fantasy novel. It’s sexier. They’re selling a vibe.
The great perfumer-company owner savant era was already dying in the time of François Coty and Jacques Guerlain. Its death was, in truth, when Coco Chanel hired Ernest Beaux to make №5. Frederic Malle sought to demystify the perfumer behind the curtain by putting their names on his bottles — and in light of that, it seems absurd that houses should try to hide who really makes their perfumes. It seems absurd that they ever did.
Well, one house never did. Chanel never did. Chanel has always had an in-house perfumer, a guarantor of quality and brand cohesion, a guardian at the gate. Other houses have since sought to replicate this — Mathilde Laurent at Cartier, Thierry Wasser at Guerlain, Jean-Claude Ellena and then Christine Nagel at Hermes, François Demachy at Dior. And Jacques Polge had made some of Chanel’s greatest sellers, but there was a whole new Les Exclusifs line to create, and they wanted someone to make it good — better than good. Better than niche.
They wanted Christopher Sheldrake.
PART 3 — FRENCH INHERITANCE LAW
The story goes like this:
Serge Lutens, iconoclast, becomes creative director for Shiseido. His first perfume for the brand, Nombre Noir (1982), becomes the stuff of perfumed legend. Serge Lutens commissions Feminite du Bois ten years later from Pierre Bourdon and Christopher Sheldrake, a perfumer at the company Quest. Feminite du Bois redefines how feminine marketed perfumes smell — its use of cedar notes in the base was radical. Serge Lutens decides that he’s pretty good at this perfume thing and creates his own house with Shiseido’s backing called Serge Lutens. He works with Chris Sheldrake to make his scents, and one of the greatest creative director/perfumer collaborations in perfumery is born.
Niche perfumery is carved into being by Chris Sheldrake and Serge Lutens. They release La Myrrhe (1995), Muscs Koublai Khan (1998), Un Bois Vanille (2003), Borneo 1834 (2005). It seems like every Serge Lutens becomes a reference point in perfumery, those coveted bell jars radiating excellence. The best jasmine is Sarrasins by Serge Lutens. The best amber is Ambre Sultan by Serge Lutens. Perfumery fans start calling him Uncle Serge. One can imagine those other perfumers stuck in the lab submitting briefs doomed to fail for a barrage of celebrity scents wanting that freedom, that glory.
“It must have been fun to see everyone,” Luca Turin writes, “from Guerlain downward, gradually fall into step and pay (Sheldrake) the sincerest compliment, imitation.” ³
For Chanel, purveyors of luxury and more importantly of good taste, it would have been obvious. They needed the best of the best. They needed Chris Sheldrake to make a niche line within the greater Chanel house. And that’s exactly what he did.
In Sheldrake‘s own words: “Just before [Quest] was bought by Givaudan, I got a strange feeling inside that it was time to go. I called up Jacques Polge because I’d worked with him before. Jacques said ‘come over and have a drink, but there’s no job going!’, so we had a chat, and we talked about lots of things we might do together. Then he called back, three months later and said ‘can you come over again — quickly!’ and so, that was it — very fortunate, because it was the only place really I wanted to go.”
If you believe that perfumery is a conversation between the perfumer and the consumer, ‘the most portable form of intelligence we have’, Sheldrake’s work for Les Exclusifs de Chanel is a perfumed victory lap, a show and tell of how and why he climbed to the summit of perfumery and was called in by the last great house standing to make their niche line.
This is most obvious to me with a comparison between Borneo 1834 (Serge Lutens, 2005) and Coromandel (Les Exclusifs de Chanel, 2007). They are both ruminations on Angel (Thierry Mugler, 1992), which created a new genre of perfumery called gourmands centered around a sugar/ethyl maltol and patchouli accord that gives an impression of chocolate. Perfumes in this genre are typically loud, cheerful, and bordering on garish — your La Vie Est Belles (Lancome, 2012), your Flowerbombs (Viktor&Rolf, 2005).
With Borneo 1834 Sheldrake set out to tame the beast and prove that you could have an elegant, restrained, and complex chocolate-patchouli scent. He succeeded. Borneo smells dusty, faded, like the rugs that were stuffed with patchouli leaves to keep pests away on their long seaward trip from Indonesia to Europe that inspired the perfume’s name. Things lurk in the depths of Borneo 1834. The patchouli evokes an earlier, darker time of the world, when the things Europe took from places it had colonised took a long time to reach their destination. It’s a thoughtful, introspective perfume, the olfactory equivalent of a Merchant-Ivory film.
Coromandel — another far-flung Eastern location scent being released by a French house evoking that unsettling seam of colonialism — is the white chocolate twin to Borneo’s bittersweet. Considered by many to be the best patchouli scent on the market, it is utterly seamless and refined, an unfurling of cocoa butter and resins and that ever present base of earthy patchouli to anchor it on your skin. There is no house on earth that does elegant dust quite like Chanel, and Coromandel is the zenith of the mountain. Chanel’s reputation for refinement is wielded like a scythe by Sheldrake, carving off the rougher parts of Borneo to make it somehow even more hauntingly beautiful in Coromandel.
The connection between the two scents is unmistakable. Coromandel feels like Sheldrake took that original idea for Borneo — make Angel elegant by honouring the natural facets of patchouli — and refined it to the apex of where it could go. Make it more than elegant, make it Chanel. The Les Exclusifs line is a phenomenal success, both in sales and in making people talk once again about Chanel as an innovator in perfumery, the head of the pack. A Chanel release is exciting. A Les Exclusifs release, in perfume circles, is the Olympics.
When Jacques Polge retired, one could be safe in assuming that Sheldrake would take up the mantle at Chanel as its in-house perfumer. Sheldrake’s job, after all, was ‘to oversee the quality control from beginning to end’.
But the baton passed instead to Olivier Polge, Jacques’ son.
“I remember when I was 10 and my father came up with Coco,” Olivier Polge said in an interview. “I remember the small bottles at home. Chanel was always there.”
“When the great Jacques Polge semi-retired,’ writes Luca Turin, ‘I was surprised to hear that he had been replaced by his son Olivier and not by Chanel’s other perfumer, Chris Sheldrake, whose perfumery record is incomparably more impressive. Clearly, hereditary titles in France, contrary to popular belief, were not abolished on that heady night of August 4, 1789.” ⁴
Enter the son.
Olivier Polge is young, but it’s not like he is fresh from ISIPCA. He’s got a few scents under his belt — he made Dior Homme (Dior, 2005), the best designer masculine of the past twenty years. He did not define an epoch, like Christopher Sheldrake. He has not made Antaeus, like his father. But perhaps Chanel hopes that olfactory talent passes through the genes and they will get forty more steady years out of the Polge family. All that we know is that for any future scents in the Les Exclusifs collection, Polge the Younger is going to have to innovate. To be better than the rest, to be better than niche, to write his name in lights next to Ernest Beaux and Henri Robert and his own father, to be Chanel.
And what does Chanel give him? An impossible brief. Chanel wants a Les Exclusif, but not just any Les Exclusif. They want a perfume for the Middle Eastern market, and they want it without oud.
PART 4 — A PERFUME ATELIER IN THE SOUK
Did the West discover oud, or did oud discover the West?
In perfume circles we talk about how we believe some houses have a ‘DNA’ to all their scents, a drop of a secret blend in every perfume that brings a cohesion to the entire line no matter how different the scents may be. The most famous of these is Guerlain’s, and it’s called the Guerlinade. For the lack of a better term, this concept is now called Guerlinade for every house.
For me, the most obvious case of Guerlinade is Chanel. What is this scent, the invisible essence of every Chanel perfume? On paper it is the touchstones of №5, aldehydes and a transparent floral note that my nose reads as iris. But for many women it’s a feeling of being put together, dressed up, of wearing proper perfume. It’s a childhood indoctrination into the idea of Chanel as elegance, the kind of thing you wear when you are a successful woman, the kind of woman other women want to be. That’s what №5 is, because it was the perfect perfume released at the perfect time to become the Platonic ideal of what a perfume should be. That’s the feeling Chanel tries to create with every new release, every flanker, every perfumed pencil. The shadow of Chanel across the West is so long that it is the context through which many of us understand perfumery itself.
In the Middle East, perfume has a history far older than aldehydes.
The word perfume comes from the Latin par fumum, which means ‘through smoke’. The origins of perfume come from burning incense and using it to scent rooms, hair, clothes. Incense — taken here to mean frankincense, boswellia sacra — is a resin native to trees that grow in Somalia, Oman, and Yemen. It is not an exaggeration to say that the Arab world invented perfume. There is a perfume culture in the Middle East so much more advanced and complex than the West that has existed on its own for thousands of years.
Vogue Business writes, “City Walk in Dubai is dotted with small perfume shops where women sample and purchase fragrances and the smoke of oud sticks permeates their hair. It’s a tradition that has been passed down through generations in the Middle East, where three bottles of perfume are sold every second and fragrances make up 70 per cent of the prestige beauty category … The Arab customer has traditionally seen perfume as non-gendered. Many men favour floral notes mixed with rose, while traditional fragrance stores often don’t segregate between genders when displaying products.”
Traditional Arabic perfumery comes in the form of attars, highly concentrated perfume oils that linger close to the skin and are designed for layering. People will layer up to seven different scents on themselves at one time, from perfume attars to eau de parfum to bukhoor incense. The result is a sort of DIY fragrance that will continually shift and evolve throughout the day. Though layering scents are usually simple so they can combine with other notes on the skin, if a Western perfume is going to sell in the Middle East it has got to be complex enough to replace seven scents in one.
The first great halfway point between French perfumery and the Arabic market was the house of Amouage. A perfumery commissioned by the sultan of Oman in 1983 ‘to preserve the perfume making traditions of Oman’, it hires French perfumers through the fragrance firms to make bombastic, mile wide, absolute showstopper perfumes. Once you smell Interlude Man (2012), it changes you. For someone who has only smelled French perfumery, it’s an eye opener.
In the past twenty years French perfumery has turned its eyes and its nose towards the Middle East. What happened? Two things at once: the Gulf states got rich, and sandalwood and oakmoss vanished.
Sandalwood, an indispensable ingredient in perfumery, is a fixative and base note that is woody but also slightly milky and creamy. It is grown in India, Australia, and New Caledonia. The best sandalwood comes from southern India and is known as Mysore sandalwood. A sandalwood tree takes 25 years to mature to the point that it can be harvested. In the late 20th century sandalwood was overharvested and became critically endangered. The Indian government stepped in to regulate, sandalwood prices skyrocketed, and the perfume industry now has no choice but to wait until the trees grow back again.
Oakmoss, an indispensable ingredient in perfumery, is a fixative and base note that is green but also slightly bitter and suedey. It is grown naturally across the Mediterranean. It is a crucial element of the fougere and chypre fragrance families. The International Fragrance Association (IFRA), which is run by the industry’s fragrance firms, began in the 90’s to advise the EU that certain ingredients, including oakmoss, were dangerous allergens for a portion of the population. The EU began to heavily regulate these ingredients. Almost overnight, to be able to keep selling in Europe designer houses had to reformulate all of their perfumes. That’s not an exaggeration - all of their perfumes. When you read people saying that perfume just doesn’t smell the same, this is why.
(What are perfumes reformulated with when they take out the natural ingredients? Synthetic alternatives… copyrighted and sold by the fragrance firms who run IFRA).
So sandalwood is endangered, oakmoss is illegal, animalics are unethical, and that designer house still wants a submission for their brief. What new material is going to fill the gap?
The material, it turns out, wasn’t new. It was old. It was oud.
Oud, also known as oudh, aoud, agarwood, and aloeswood, is an infection of the agarwood tree. It is incredibly expensive and increasingly rare. It has been used for centuries as incense across Asia, from the Gulf to Japan, and is especially loved in the Arabian peninsula. It is a deep, complex woody scent with facets that smell can smell like curdled cheese, barnyard floor, and the cleaning products used at your dentist. Oud lasts; oud projects; oud is unmistakeable.
The first oud scent majorly marketed in the west was M7 (Yves Saint Laurent, 2002), created under Tom Ford’s helm. I love this perfume: it’s fresh but medicinal and bracing, like cherry Coca-Cola you drink in a sterilised hospital room. It was a massive flop and YSL quickly rolled it back, perhaps hoping we would forget it ever happened. This perfume did not use real oud, centering instead on a synthetic counterpart. But it didn’t matter - the tidal wave of oud had begun.
Western perfumery for the past fifteen years has been oud mad. Tom Ford wasn’t done: now with his own house came Oud Wood (2007), Oud Fleur and Tobacco Oud (both 2013). Oud For Love, Oud For Greatness, In The Mood for Oud, Oud Satin Mood, Oud Bouquet… there is an oud for every day of the year. Of course, the majority of these ouds don’t use the real stuff because it is prohibitively expensive, but some of them get pretty close to recreating the feeling. You know real oud when you smell it. My favourite true oud is l’Oudh (Tauer, 2018), a gut punch of a perfume that feels as thick and as dark as tar.
Then consumers in the Middle East started buying these faux ouds. They started buying a lot. Money is thick in the Gulf States, and people in these countries will pay a staggering amount for their perfumes. Vogue Business writes, “Middle Easterners are more likely than Westerners to buy fragrance in bulk, both for layering and convenience. The Middle East and North Africa are forecast to generate $8.5 billion in fragrance sales by 2021, according to Euromonitor, up from $5.7 billion in 2018.”
Capitalism will out. The West started making perfumes specifically for the Arab market.
The Middle East exclusive release has become a cliche for niche and designer brands alike. The Night (Frederic Malle, 2014), which uses real oud, will set you back $1600 for 100ml. Much like clothing companies now selling rainbow branded merchandise all June for Pride, the French perfume houses are paying attention to the Middle East because they found out there was money in the desert.
Chanel is one of the few perfume houses left that does not have an oud in their portfolio.
The problem facing Olivier Polge in making a perfume for the Middle Eastern market is that oud is not Chanel. The restrained, soapy-aldehydic-floral Guerlinade of Chanel cannot embrace oud. They are like oil and water, a scent that is designed to effortlessly become a part of your aura (Chanel) and a scent that’s meant to announce on loudspeaker that you have arrived (oud). But there’s money to be made in the Middle East, and Chanel wants to sell, has to sell, LVMH is waiting like a hungry bear in the wintertime and no one in Kuwait wants to smell like Platinum Egoiste. This is the land of the attar, the bukhoor. The styles of Chanel and Arabic perfumery are as far from one another as the earth is from the moon.
How do you make a Chanel for the Middle Eastern market when the perfume culture is the very antithesis of Chanel? Maybe Jacques Polge could have done it. Maybe Chris Sheldrake could have done it. But what — dear god, what is Olivier Polge going to do?
Olivier Polge is going to make Shalimar.
PART 4 — OCCIDENT AND ORIENT
Orientalism, as Edward Said defined it in his book of the same name, “can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient — dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” ⁵
There is a fragrance family called orientals.
An oriental perfume is defined by a warm amber — a resinous mix of labdanum, vanilla, and benzoin — in the base. (There is a movement to stop calling these perfumes ‘oriental’ and start calling them ‘ambers’). The fragrance family is so called in English because when the style originated in the early 20th century the ingredients were seen as decidedly Eastern in origin. The raw materials come from the Orient; the perfume is oriental.
Western perfumery only exists as we know it because of colonialism. If the vanilla orchid hadn’t been taken from Central America by the Spanish and then planted by the French on Réunion and then the method of its cultivation invented by a 12 year old slave named Edmond Albius, we would not have vanilla. And if vanilla had not traveled from Réunion to France where the molecule vanillin was isolated from it, we would not have Jicky or Shalimar or anything that came after them.
Even now the majority of natural ingredients for perfumery are cultivated in the third world by the fragrance firms (or in the case of Chanel, l’éxéption, the house itself) before being shipped to France. It feels colonial. Send us your raw materials and we’ll craft them into something great. Vetiver from Haiti, patchouli from Indonesia, orange blossom from Tunisia. Bottled in France.
The grande dame of oriental perfumes is Shalimar (Guerlain, 1925), named after the famous gardens of a Mughal emperor. It was further embellishment on the first true oriental, Emeraude (Coty, 1921). The structure of Shalimar is as recognisable as an Art Deco building, an olfactory image of the 1920’s captured in a bottle. Bergamot and lemon, bright and sharp, an animalic blast of civet prowling around, a warm vanillic amber waiting in the drydown. To smell a perfume inspired by Shalimar is like hearing a different artist sing an Edith Piaf song — after a brief moment of discombobulation you feel a pull in your gut, and then you smile as you recognise your old friend. Hello, Shalimar.
At perfumery schools students attempt to recreate Shalimar by smell alone. It is a formula they could probably recite in their sleep — bergamot, vanillin, cistus labdanum, benzoin absolute… What every perfume in this style lacks is the feeling Shalimar gives you, the way it plunges you immediately to a bar in Paris in 1925, Josephine Baker on the stage. The classic flacon, that lemon top note that is always harsher than you remember, les anneés folles, the unbroken line of women going back to the day it went on the shelves filling the air with civet and vanilla.
“Probably the largest single fragrance category in the word is Failed Shalimars,” writes Luca Turin. “Everyone has had a go, very few got anywhere near it.”
Chanel has never released a classic amber, a Shalimar. There are contenders — Cuir de Russie, but it is too leathery; Coromandel, but it is too heavy in patchouli; Coco, which is undoubtedly an amber but was made in response to Opium (YSL, 1977) and not in the style of Shalimar.
‘When I do vanilla, I get crème Anglaise,’ Ernest Beaux is reported to have said, ‘but when Guerlain does it, he gets Shalimar!’
The style of Shalimar is old turf for perfumery, but it is new ground for Chanel. If, indeed, ‘The dream team at Chanel seems to delight in applying superior skills to existing ideas they deem worthy of perfecting’ ⁶, does this mean that the solution Olivier Polge has found to his problem is to try and perfect Shalimar? One of the greatest perfumes of all time, the perfume they teach you to make in perfume school, the structure presumably none of the other guys at Chanel tried to mess with because it is Shalimar?
In some ways, it’s clever: an oriental can be loud, animalic, forceful, and a neat solution to the problem of making a perfume for the Middle East with no oud. In other ways, it is a Sisyphean task: no one is ever going to perfect Shalimar, and no perfume lover needs another amber on their shelves.
As if Olivier Polge had anything else to worry about. Then #BoycottFrenchProducts started trending.
Sometimes there are difficulties that come from being a French luxury goods house. Protestors target your stores. French beauty brands do not just sell a product, they sell the idea of Frenchness. It’s a strange phenomenon in the Anglophone world, how we worship the French as if they have some kind of Gallic secret to beauty and style that they’re simply keeping to themselves. ‘Oh, my perfume? It’s French.’ There is a reason Josephine Esther Mentzer decided to go by the name Esteé Lauder for her business.
But France was a colonial power too. The echo of France’s boot is felt in many parts of the world — West Africa, Polynesia, Guadeloupe. The Middle East. Like the war in Algeria that was never officially a war, the cultural struggle between France and the countries it colonised is something France mostly tries to ignore — until it can’t.
The idea of Frenchness, the way the French actively protect and gatekeep their culture, is not without its victims. In response to the accelerating conflict between the French government and Islam, the internet is starting to talk about what it means to be anything other than the stereotypical, Emily in Paris idea of what French is:
French identity is based on “a single, indivisible republic” that makes no distinction among its citizens, and where any division of the republic into individual identity groups must be prevented. The French state is supposed to be colour-blind, and does not collect data on race, ethnicity or religion. However, unlike New York or London, “Paris tends to use the same image of whiteness in its marketing,” says journalist, film-maker and activist Rokhaya Diallo. Denying the very existence of race, she says, means that “in France, we don’t really have a conversation about it”.
You can be Muslim, you can be an immigrant, you can be anything you like — so long as you are French first.
It was disheartening to see President Macron embrace Gaullist sentiment and go further to the right in response to what he calls ‘Islamist separatism’ within France. And how did the Muslim world respond? Direct action against the most overt soft power France has — they boycotted buying French products.
Can you make a statement through not buying something? Are you making a statement if you buy it anyway? I don’t believe in activism through purchases, but those interlocking C’s on a Chanel bottle seem to get more and more laden with baggage with every year.
Chanel planned for a 2020 Middle Eastern exclusive release for Le Lion. It went ahead even as brick and mortar stores were being shuttered the world over in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and #BoycottFrenchProducts began a few months later. Chanel later delayed other releases planned for 2020, including the new scent Paris-Edimbourg.
In May 2020, the month Le Lion debuted, Chanel increased the price of their bags and other fashion items by 15 percent, and then by another 5 percent in November 2020. They weren’t alone — Louis Vuitton, Hermès, and many other luxury brands began hiking their prices when lockdowns began. This led, somewhat predictably, to lines down the street in front of luxury stores in the middle of a pandemic. Le Lion’s worldwide release was in January 2021. Now it would be forever tied with the pandemic, always in the context of lockdowns and social distancing and luxury brands increasing prices when millions of people were losing their jobs.
Released on the 100th anniversary of №5, in the middle of a pandemic keeping people from stores and a culture war between France and the Muslim world, trying to perfect Shalimar. How could Le Lion do anything but disappoint?
PART 5 — LE LION AND I
I don’t own a Chanel perfume.
I know, I know. What kind of fragrance fanatic am I? I like the EDT of Coco, with its 80’s bombast, but there is only one Chanel I have ever loved: the Sheldrake composed Sycomore (2008), a glorious and severe vetiver. The reason I haven’t bought it is because there is a strikingly similar scent called Encre Noire (Lalique, 2006) that costs about a tenth of what Sycomore does. It is the best $40 I have ever spent on a perfume.
The price point of Chanel is a part of the allure. They are not cheap scents from the chemist; you dress fancy when you’re going to a Chanel boutique. And though I don’t care for most of their scents I know, objectively, that Chanel makes good perfume. They’re well blended and refined, classic and slightly boring, safe for even the most scent averse.
Chanel: a safe blind buy.
I first smelled Le Lion in 2021, in a department store that was so luxe it was almost absurd. The ceilings were high and the walls so creamy white it felt like a cavernous hall in Valhalla; there was a man sitting at a grand piano in full tuxedo playing instrumental covers of pop songs - perfume shopping on the set of Bridgerton.
There is a certain joy we fragrance freaks feel when those little sample vials arrive in the mail, new potions to dab and spray and ponder over, but it’s a different feeling when you go to the big cities and smell the perfumes in their natural habitat. Maybe it’s that you can see the bottles, pick them up and feel the heft; maybe it’s the euphoric feeling of knowing there are a hundred more perfumes to try all around you. I keep a plastic bag of my own blotters and a pen in my bag, but I love walking up to a counter and taking a stack of branded blotters and spraying until you’re surrounded by a miasma of ambroxan and patchouli and rose. I felt victorious that day, like I had defeated COVID-19 personally somehow by going to smell perfumes. It’s the little things.
I never gravitate to the Chanel counter. I had gone to this specific store with one goal in mind, to spray Guerlain’s Apres L’Ondée (Guerlain, 1906, they didn’t have a bottle). Besides, I knew what I’d find at Chanel. Aldehydes and iris, that restrained emotion like a face obscured behind a pane of glass. Elegance, composure, Nazi collaboration, Chanel. But before I two took steps into the store there was Le Lion, its tall and handsome bottle against a red backdrop, a giant lion superimposed above it. It was like someone had started blasting The Circle of Life. It was like it was saying you want to try me. You came all this way. The pandemic will be over soon and I am the new Chanel.
I do my homework — I had heard all about Le Lion. I read the post when it had been announced for release in the Middle East exclusively. I watched the review videos when people started getting illicit decants, and then more reviews when it launched in the US and Europe. I had heard people saying it was a modern Shalimar, cozy, warm, ambery. People saying it smelled forceful, animalic, vintage.
That’s the way to our hearts, we lovers of fragrance. It smells vintage. It smells the way that things used to smell before the regulations, before IFRA, before fruitchoulis and ambroxan and Aventus, before endless masculines in blue bottles. Vintage. Like a little glimpse past the gates and back into Eden.
I thought it was funny, the endorsement of vintage, the comparisons to Shalimar. Partly because of the sublime hubris of Olivier Polge, partly because of the cleverness of the loophole he’d found out of his no oud issue. But mostly because I loved Shalimar and the idea of repressed, elegant Chanel trying to take make a perfume with cleaning product lemon/screaming civet/overpowering amber was like a ballerina dancing to heavy metal. So I decided, out of curiosity, that maybe I would spray Le Lion after all.
When it comes to perfume, I read everything I can get my hands on. There are out of print books on the subject in English that I hunt down on eBay and secondhand sites. I watch countless videos, read deep analysis, haunt Fragrantica like it’s my job. I know what an amber smells like. I know what a Chanel perfume smells like. I think I know what Le Lion is going to smell like.
And then Le Lion shocked me. Because, after all of it, Le Lion did not smell like I expected.
Le Lion smelled good.
People talk about top and middle and base notes in perfume like there are accords lying in wait to show up at the two and four and six hour mark that weren’t there before. It’s not really like that — all the notes are right there when you spray it, it’s just that some flare and fade faster than others. It’s a gradual unfurling, the perfume shedding layers until only the bare bones, the drydown, is left. It’s an incomparably beautiful thing, even in its most rudimentary form, and you can never be unemotional about it because it is happening on your skin and you are smelling it with your nose. Because perfume is a conversation and you’re the one on the other end.
I sprayed Le Lion on the embossed Chanel blotter, right over those interlocked C’s, and could smell it immediately. This is a good thing — I felt a thrill that the projection was so strong and the perfume had enough character that I didn’t have to hunt for it on the paper like a bloodhound. And I did think hello, Shalimar. The ghost of Guerlain was certainly there, that scaffolding, the bergamot prominent in the way that citrus is always prominent on first spray. Le Lion begins with a note that is slightly harsh, the way lemon skin smells when you cut it and the essential oil sprays everywhere.
But what stood out to me most was that amber.
Amber perfumes can be powdery (Ambre Sultan, Serge Lutens), dry (L’air du desert Marocain, Tauer), spicy (Ambre Loup, Rania J), animalic (Shalimar), or medicinal (this one). Two of the main components of the amber accord, labdanum and benzoin, were historically used as tinctures and balms. There’s something in our animal brain that registers these things as medicine, sickness, something is wrong. And Le Lion absolutely smelled like bandages. Like fancy, vanilla daubed, brushed with patchouli bandages.
I cannot describe to you the delight this brought me.
What you need to know about my perfume taste is that I like to smell like a medicine cabinet. Tiger Balm, muscle rub, menthol, camphor, cherry cough syrup: I love clinical smells that give people a sense of existential dread. I love the smell of gasoline, turpentine, fresh paint, permanent markers, hot plastic, eucalyptus. This isn’t the only kind of perfume I like — give me a syrupy tuberose, a harsh leather, a dry iris, a churchy incense — but it’s the kind of smell I’ve loved since I was a child. The medicine cabinet calls to me.
I love perfumes people call challenging. I just wasn’t expecting to find a perfume like that in Le Lion.
For a second, I was discombobulated — wait, this was Chanel? Was she lurking in there, that Chanel girl, the accord as familiar to me as an old acquaintance from my youth? That soapy-aldehydic, orris root spine that binds every perfume from №5 to Coco Mademoiselle L’Eau Privée (2020)? I can’t make her out. I’m sure she’s lingering in the mid notes but she’s drowned out by that amber, that glorious sucker punch of an amber, medicinal and overwhelming.
Le Lion isn’t here to mess around — this thing is forceful. The lion’s got guts. The boys on YouTube probably won’t touch this with a ten foot pole but if they ever did they would call it beast mode. Instead of using amber as a base note, after the initial blast of citrus the entire perfume is amber, like Polge has taken the accord apart piece by piece to examine it in detail.
There is a magical thing that happens when the elements of amber are blended together. It’s like when all the Power Rangers combine to make one giant robot ranger. A good amber smoulders on the skin; a bad amber smells like the worst Yankee Candle in the world. Whether it is excellent or awful, amber is a demonstration of the phrase more than the sum of its parts.
The most dominant note in Le Lion’s amber, to my nose, is the labdanum. Also called cistus and rockrose, labdanum is a resin that comes from cistus flowers. It was traditionally collected by combing the hair of goats who ate the flowers and got tar-like labdanum caught in their fur.
Labdanum, like oud, does not come from an animal but still smells animalic. It smells a little like birch tar, the ingredient most used to evoke leather in perfume, and it smells smoky, like the thickness of the air around a bonfire. As a component of amber labdanum is often smoothed of its rough edges but Le Lion instead enhances them, giving the scent a forcefulness that radiates almost menacingly. Don’t mess with me.
As Le Lion continues to unfurl, in comes the vanilla. The topic of vanilla in perfumery could have entire novels written about it. Vanilla in many ways is the olfactory equivalent of the Madonna/whore complex. Let us summarise this by saying that perfume is a tale of two vanillas: sexbomb and cupcake. Shalimar is a sex bomb. Black Opium (YSL, 2014) is a cupcake. If you aim for one and land in the other like Tobacco Vanille (Tom Ford, 2007, cupcake), it is disastrous.
But Le Lion is clever. Instead of using the labdanum to tame the vanilla, which would take this into Spiritueuse Double Vanille (Guerlain, 2007, fancy cupcake) territory Polge does the reverse, letting the more unctuous and animalic facets of the resins shine and using the vanilla to round off only the sharpest of edges. Shalimar does the same, using the creaminess and not the sweetness of vanilla to balance an animalic civet.
Of the three heads of the amber dragon, vanilla is the most overplayed. Vanilla itself is not sweet. Vanilla absolute doesn’t actually smell that nice. I love a mean vanilla, and Le Lion’s isn’t completely nasty but it’s getting there. Compared to the overdose of sweet vanillas we have on the perfume market today, it’s practically evil. A grown up, sophisticated vanilla, a vanilla with bad intentions — an animalic vanilla. There’s something delicious when a note so closely tied with comfort is twisted and made to unsettle you. This was maybe the hardest part for Polge to get right — to not make creme Anglaise, as Ernest Beaux put it, but to make Shalimar.
What else is tinkering around in Le Lion? Patchouli and sandalwood, which can both have medicinal facets themselves. Polge uses them here to round out the perfume and give it a body and depth that is the greatest strength of classic Chanel — their perfumes develop, they go from light to shadow, they last. Many reviewers have seen a touch of Coromandel in Le Lion, but there is little in common between the two besides the fact that they’re both Les Exclusifs and they both have patchouli. Both the sandalwood and patchouli are used as woody notes to ground the scent but they’re firmly second fiddle, merely reinforcing that central labdanum-vanilla amber.
Though Le Lion contains no synthetics meant to mimic the traditional perfumery ingredients taken from animals like hyrax or civet, it does smell animalic. That strange, earthy, slightly disgusting but also comforting smell of living things — that’s what animalic perfumes smell like, and that is present in Le Lion. Animalic doesn’t always mean a horrible funk, and can in fact be quite wonderful — butter smells animalic, honey smells animalic. But more than that it is the smell of us, of humanity, of other people’s bodies. An animalic perfume is always marketed as sexy, and they are, but more than that they are intimate. It’s that quiet moment in the morning when you wake up before your lover and are surrounded by the smell their slightly dirty hair. Le Lion remains at every stage slightly animalic, slightly medicinal, golden and strange.
These adjectives have something common, of course: they all describe oud. But Le Lion is not a perfume with an oud-shaped hole in its heart, as synthetic ouds can sometimes seem. This is full bodied and decidedly amber, it just plays a clever trick in making you think of oud. It’s like going to a restaurant and ordering a vegetarian burger. It’s not meat, and it’s not trying to trick you into thinking it is, it just wants to evoke the feeling. There was a small controversy after Frederic Malle released Portrait of a Lady and had to tell fans, quite firmly, that there was no oud in the perfume, even if they thought they could smell it. Spyros Drosopoulos did something similar when he created NOOUD (Baruti, 2016), which is exactly what it says on the tin — an accord of everything but oud that still somehow smells like the real thing. Le Lion is another no oud.
The drydown on my blotter for Le Lion has been lingering for a week. Perhaps lingering isn’t the right word — it is still very much present, as if someone had taken it about seven hours after spraying and frozen it in, well, amber. I smile every time I smell Le Lion. Here is Olivier Polge come like Lawrence of Arabia to sell this strange not-Shalimar not-oud hybrid thing in the bazaar. Maybe Le Lion is not seven perfumes in one. Maybe it’s about five. But against all odds, Polge the Younger has made something intelligent and beautiful in Le Lion.
Let’s not pretend like it would even be possible to recreate Shalimar today. The natural civet alone rules it impossible — I would bet good money that almost every ingredient in the original Shalimar has been regulated by IFRA. There is an art, then, in using the modern perfumer’s palette to create something that smells convincingly vintage, to give the illusion of ingredients that aren’t there. As more and more ingredients become restricted by IFRA and other regulatory bodies, the quest to make a vintage scent becomes harder.
So why on earth did Olivier Polge think that reinterpreting the basics was going to work?
Why, because he’s done it before.
Polge the Younger made three Les Exclusifs before Le Lion. Two of them, Misia and 1957, are boring retreads of Chanel’s home turf. The third, Boy, is a clever little thing. It reinterprets the fougere, a fragrance family traditionally worn by men, into an elegant feminine targeted scent given the Chanel touch.
Fougeres are defined by an accord of lavender, oakmoss and coumarin (tonka bean). Lavender notes in feminine perfumes are having a resurgence — Mon Guerlain (Guerlain, 2017), Libre (YSL, 2019), and R.E.M (Ariana Grande, 2020) all showcase lavender in the top notes — and Boy’s lavender is charming, supported by a cool vanilla and coumarin drydown.
Boy is for the girl in the white shirt who finds florals too fussy and prefers to swipe her boyfriend’s cologne. It is named for Chanel’s lover Boy Capel but it’s a fougere, it’s called Boy, and it’s for women. Did you see what Monsieur Polge did there?
I liked Boy when I smelled it. I liked its cleverness. I liked that it smelled like a vintage fougere even though it could not use real oakmoss. Boy reminded me of Nomade (Chloé, 2018), a stunning designer fragrance that uses an overdose of synthetic oakmoss substitutes.
In both Nomade and Boy I smell the future of perfumery, feminine targeted fragrances that feel bold because they play with our assumptions of what men and women should smell like, using oakmoss synthetics to do it. I liked that there were perfumers who could acknowledge that there was a dialogue to be had about perfume and gender, about who can wear what, about the way marketing gets in the way of our noses sometimes. And I liked that Boy was coming from a legacy perfumer at the very centre of the industry.
Le Lion plays that same trick, not innovating something new but making a commentary on something very, very old. It feels subversive because it takes the structure of Shalimar, the oriental, a bastion of French perfumery, and tries to see it through the mindset of Arabic perfumery. This is not a perfume created for the French. It’s not a perfume for people who want to be French. This is a perfume made for a market who knows what they like, who are literate when it comes to scent. Sometimes the impossibility of a situation inspires ingenuity, and somewhere in the impossibility of this brief Olivier Polge has found something interesting to say about amber, the most tread upon ground in perfumery.
At last, something that breaks the shackles of №5 and speaks with its own voice — even if all it has to say is a postscript on Shalimar that’s a hundred years too late.
Is Le Lion a perfection of form, a study in sophistication and elegance like Coromandel and Sycomore? Of course not. But that, I think, is the point. Misia and 1957 were Polge the Younger’s attempt at making Sheldrake inspired scents, and they were wan and spineless. With Boy and even more so in Le Lion, he finds his feet by taking classic French perfume structures and bringing them into the modern world. And when you think about it, a perfume like this could only make such a statement if it came from the house of Chanel. The gold standard. L’éxéption.
Would I buy a bottle of Le Lion? I don’t know. I feel like the intertwined c’s of a Chanel bottle would watch me from the mantle while I slept, judging. And I think about the mother who buys her child The Little Book of Chanel. That Coco, a real girlboss. Do I like it more than Sycomore? No — Sycomore actually is a perfection of form, the best vetiver on the market. But I like Le Lion second best of the Chanel set. More than Coco, more than Coromandel. Olivier Polge pinpointed a gap in the Les Exclusifs lineup and he made a stunning fragrance to fill it.
I can’t stop smelling this oud for vegetarians, Chanel for Chanel haters, zombie labdanum amber baby. It isn’t Shalimar, a French perfume using Orientalism to sell itself to a French market. This is Le Lion, a French perfume using Frenchness to market itself to the Orient. It is Shalimar’s dark mirror. And I don’t know if that is what Olivier Polge intended, but I think it’s the cleverest part of all.
PART 6 — LISTEN TO THE LION
If you believe that perfumery is a conversation between the perfumer and the consumer, what does Le Lion have to say?
I’m not in the industry. I don’t have insider information, don’t hear any gossip. I’m just someone half a world away in Australia who loves perfume. The industry is opaque and inaccessible and they like it that way. I am left as an armchair detective, cobbling together evidence to try and understand what this perfume is telling me.
Perhaps Chanel offered Chris Sheldrake the role of in-house perfumer and he declined, thinking as Francis Kurkdjian does that being an in-house perfumer ‘is like your retirement’. Sheldrake still works for Chanel. Perhaps Le Lion was a collaborative work and only Olivier Polge is credited, as Sheldrake was often not credited on scents like Coromandel that clearly bore his artistry.
But when I smell Le Lion I smell a hundred years of perfume history, how much things have changed and how much is the same. I smell Madagascar vanilla, Indonesian patchouli, New Caledonian sandalwood, crafted in France. I smell colonialism, nepotism, orientalism, laïcité. I smell the Western snob who wants to smell unique, the fragrance obsessive who wants something vintage, the Emirati who wants something complex. I smell a stressed out Olivier Polge hitting the brief with panache by going back to the basics.
Le Lion is a legacy perfumer making a niche perfume for a designer house for the Middle Eastern market in a style steeped in colonialism that was born in the wake of great social change and a worldwide pandemic, being released in the wake of great social change and a worldwide pandemic.
I have a spreadsheet where I enter every single perfume I smell. I write the note pyramid, my thoughts, the fragrance family, a rating. I will smell anything — I want to smell everything. I smell things at the chemist they’re practically giving away and things that cost $1500 a bottle. I smell things with my most hated note, galbanum. I smell tinctures and oils at weird new age shops and spray on deodorant marketed to teenage boys. I want to think about what I smell. You have to train yourself to think about it — the gut response to perfume is always how you feel.
It was only when I was entering it into my spreadsheet that I realised I couldn’t stop thinking about Le Lion. I thought about Polge the Elder and Polge the Younger and Chris Sheldrake, about ambers and Shalimar and exceptional beans, about oud and the Middle East and the legacy of №5, Frenchness and Nazis and French Nazis. About LVMH and IFRA and the state of the perfumed nation, designer and niche and artisan and indie, about endless flankers. I thought about how I smell a Chanel perfume and imagine the kind of woman who would wear it and feel an overwhelming urge to set her free, to get her to scream, to cry, to show any sign of life, to say something.
And then I smelled the blotter of Le Lion again and I heard someone screaming. And I really, really liked it.
To think about a perfume critically is a difficult thing. It’s almost impossible to leave your emotions out of it, which is why I often find that the most interesting perfumes are the ones I don’t love. If I love something, often it is instant (Rose Flash, Tauerville), or evident after one wear (2 Man, Comme des Garcons). Perfumes I have to learn, understand — listen to — are the ones that truly shine. And perfumes I have learned to love (Jezebel, AnkaKus) are the ones I love most of all.
None of the rest of this would be different if I had hated Le Lion. Chanel is still Chanel. But I found that the context was wrapped up in why I enjoyed it. It wasn’t just the citrus, the vanilla, the labdanum, the patchouli — it was because it had a message for me. My brain started firing when I smelled it. It was, after a year cloistered at home because of a pandemic, a lesson in how it is possible to see perfume through the lens of the world and the world through the lens of a perfume. Both enriching each other. Both enriching me.
Perfume obsessives are split into factions. There are the oud heads, the beast modes, the gourmand aficionados, the people who will only smell vintage. There are people who are fanatic about the perfumers who really do make their own tinctures and mix their own blends, Papillion and Bortnikoff and Areej Le Doré. There are people who only buy little oils from Etsy and there are people who swear by Britney Spears Fantasy. There’s not very many new perfume releases that get attention from all these groups at once, but Chanel is one of them. And when I smell Le Lion, I think about how anyone who puts caveats on what perfumes they will or won’t try is robbing themselves. How will you know if you’re missing something amazing? How will you know if it was secretly good all along? How will you know unless you try?
And that’s what keeps me coming back to perfume: no matter how much you know, or read, or smell, it can still surprise you.
I can’t tell you if you’ll like Le Lion, but I think you should try it anyway. Go to the fancy store, take a blotter, spray it, and listen. Start a conversation and see what you can discover.•
REFERENCES
If you read this until the end, thank you. Where quotes are taken from online articles, they are hyperlinked. Those that aren’t are below. People will say I have leaned too heavily on Luca Turin as a source, and that is true. In my defence, I find his insight and candour on a determinedly opaque industry invaluable.
¹ Page 15, “The Perfect Scent: A Year Inside the Perfume Industry in Paris and New York.”, Burr, Chandler (2008)
² Page 66, “The Perfect Scent: A Year Inside the Perfume Industry in Paris and New York.” Burr, Chandler (2008)
³ Page 162, “The Perfumes: The A-Z Guide.” Turin, Luca; Sanchez, Tania (2008)
⁴ Page 140, “Perfumes The Guide 2018.” Turin, Luca; Sanchez, Tania (2018)
⁵ Page 12, “Orientalism.” Said, Edward (1978)
⁶ Page 395, “The Perfumes: The A-Z Guide.” Turin, Luca; Sanchez, Tania (2008)
FURTHER READING
Perfumes: The A-Z Guide, and Perfumes the Guide 2018 have probably done more to indoctrinate people into the world of scent than any perfume ever could alone. Read them if you haven’t. I also want to highlight how instrumental Tania Sanchez is to the Guides. Argument and discussion about the books always centers on Mr. Turin but without Ms. Sanchez the guides would not exist at all, and the perfume world would be poorer for it.
The Perfect Scent by Chandler Burr. He has also written a book about Turin, The Emperor of Scent.
Flower Power: Scent, Identity and Culture in the Middle East
There is a review of Le Lion de Chanel on every perfume blog worth its salt and then some. I recommend: Persolaise, NowSmellThis, and Cafleurbon. Kafkaesque, the best long form fragrance review blog, has yet to post their thoughts on Le Lion, but I eagerly await them.
I do not have a subscription to Michael Edwards’ Fragrances of the World database, just a print version from many years ago. Fragrantica is also a wonderful resource for so many things, not in the least user statistics for scents and timeline features. I really do hang around there like it’s my job.
For more information on natural ingredients, Nez The Naturals notebooks are wonderful. (They are a collaborative project with IFF).
If you are indeed going to listen to the lion, make it this version from Van Morrison’s Too Late To Stop Now. There is also a reference to Shalimar in Madam George from the eternal Astral Weeks: that smell of sweet perfume comes drifting through / the cool night air like Shalimar. It brings me joy every time I hear it.
I have just got to message you, to tell you, that this is one of the most comprehensive pieces of perfume writing I have ever come across. You have packed political thought, the psychology of olfaction and consuming, social history, colonialism, and the absolute sheer joy of smelling odd things in one beautiful essay. Thank you! Genuinely genius writing.
Probably an unpopular opinion, but at least the term oriental for fragrances is clear. If someone says it’s an “amber” I don’t know if they mean ambergris, vanilla/labdanum or like melted amber stone. Heck I’ve even heard someone describe Aventus as an amber because it has Ambroxen in it! 😭