Allure Homme Sport Eau Extrême

By 2012 Chanel had already turned Allure Homme Sport into a small dynasty, and Eau Extreme was the version built for people who found the original too well-mannered. It arrived during Jacques Polge's long tenure as Chanel's in-house perfumer - a period running from 1978 to 2015 - and is commonly attributed to him, though Chanel does not credit a nose on the product page. What the house does say is blunt enough: a powerful, dynamic fragrance for a man who thrives on extreme sensations, described as an intense eau de parfum, like a rush of adrenaline. Chanel sells it today in eau de parfum strength, which is worth knowing if you remember a lighter earlier bottle.

The opening is Italian mandarin cut with mint and sage, bright but never sugary, and there is a cool green snap of cypress that keeps the citrus from going soft. Pepper carries the middle. Then the whole thing tilts, quite deliberately, into tonka bean, white musk and clean cedar-sandalwood - a warm, almondy, faintly sweet drydown that has almost nothing to do with the sporty opening. That handover is the trick of the fragrance and the reason people who dislike fresh scents often make an exception for this one.

It is a daytime workhorse that survives being worn at night. In Highveld summer it holds up where heavier ambers collapse, and the mandarin-cypress top reads as genuinely cooling for the first twenty minutes. Office, gym bag, long-haul flight, first date - it is hard to place it badly.

On performance it is one of Chanel's more generous masculines. Expect eight hours or more from a few sprays, with real projection in the first two to three hours before it settles close to the skin as a soft tonka-musk. It is stronger and sweeter than the standard Allure Homme Sport eau de toilette and considerably longer-lived than the Cologne version, which is the lightest thing in the family. If you have only tried the Cologne and concluded Allure Sport was weak, this is the answer to that.