Bel Respiro

Bel Respiro was the name of a house before it was the name of a perfume. Chanel tells the story on its own site: Gabrielle Chanel kept a country place outside Paris called Bel Respiro, bound up with her years with Boy Capel, where she gathered friends on the lawn in spring. That memory became one of the original Les Exclusifs releases in 2007, made under Jacques Polge but credited to nobody in print, and it remains the greenest thing in the collection by a wide margin.

The opening is the part people either love immediately or never get past. It is properly green, not the polite green of a modern fig scent but something closer to crushed leaf and cut stem, with a herbal bite that reads as mint and tarragon before it reads as flowers. Chanel lists bergamot, lavender and spearmint alongside jasmine and ylang-ylang, and the citrus is there mostly to keep the greenery from turning bitter. Underneath, the composition does something unusual for a green fragrance: it warms. A quiet leathery, faintly animalic thread runs through the drydown, and sandalwood gives the last hours a dry, dusty softness. The overall effect is a garden in late morning rather than a bouquet in a vase.

It was never built to please a crowd. It suits someone who wants a fragrance that smells like a place rather than a mood, and it comes into its own on a mild Cape spring day, worn with linen, in daylight. Evening is not its natural setting.

One practical point matters. Bel Respiro was first bottled at eau de toilette strength and is made now as an eau de parfum, which makes a current bottle a denser proposition than a 2007 one; the earliest reviews of it describe something you can no longer buy. In the current form it lasts six to eight hours on skin with modest projection that stays within arm's length after the first hour. Green materials are volatile by nature, so the sparkling opening burns off quickly and what remains is the soft, leathery, floral half. That is the fragrance. Sample first.