Beige

Beige was Gabrielle Chanel's colour long before it was her perfume. She wore it, dressed her clients in it, and said it looked like the earth. Chanel put the name on a fragrance in 2008 as part of Les Exclusifs de Chanel, the collection the house launched in 2007 to tell its own story in scent rather than chase a mass market. The brief was narrow: a floral that behaves like a neutral. Chanel's own line for it is almost blunt, the colour of elegance, built on mandarin, neroli and a soft accord of hawthorn, freesia and frangipani.

What that description leaves out is the honey. Beige opens clean and slightly tart, mandarin over a green neroli that keeps things from turning sugary, but within twenty minutes a warm, waxy honey note rises through the flowers and stays for the rest of the wear. Hawthorn gives it an almond-like, faintly bitter edge. Frangipani adds a tropical creaminess that stops the honey reading as beeswax candle. It is a milky, lactonic floral rather than a crisp one, and it sits very close to skin, so the effect is less bouquet than warm complexion.

This is not a statement perfume, and it was never meant to be. It suits a Sunday lunch, a gallery, a wedding where you would rather not be the loudest thing in the room. Worn through a Cape winter it is quietly comforting; in coastal humidity the honey amplifies, so a lighter hand pays off.

One practical point that matters more than the poetry. In 2016 Chanel restaged Les Exclusifs, lifting every fragrance in it to eau de parfum strength, so Beige exists today in that concentration alone. The current version is richer and noticeably longer-lasting than the original, with six to eight hours realistic and a soft, close trail rather than a room-filling one. If you want more than that without spraying more, Chanel makes a matching Beige scented body oil, one of only a handful of fragrances in the collection given that treatment.