Boy Chanel

Arthur Capel, called Boy, was an English polo player, Gabrielle Chanel's great love and the man who financed her first shops. Chanel's own account credits his wardrobe with pushing her towards the clothes that made her name: tweed without corsets, short hair, borrowed masculinity worn on a woman's terms. Boy Chanel, added to Les Exclusifs in 2016, is the house's attempt to put that borrowing into a bottle. It arrived shortly after Olivier Polge succeeded his father Jacques as in-house perfumer, and the name usually attached is his, though Chanel prints nothing.

The structure is a fougère, the most traditionally masculine architecture in perfumery, and it has been softened deliberately rather than accidentally. Chanel describes the centre as a diffusive accord of lavender and rose geranium lifted by woody notes. Lavender leads, but it is the clean aromatic kind rather than the medicinal kind, and grapefruit and lemon keep the first half hour bright. Geranium is what makes the fragrance interesting: it is green, faintly metallic and rosy all at once, and it holds the lavender back from smelling like a barbershop. Rose and orange blossom sit behind it. The base is where the softening happens, with heliotrope and vanilla laying an almondy powder over sandalwood, coumarin and a whisper of moss.

Worn on a man it reads as a refined, slightly old-fashioned fougère. Worn on a woman it reads as a lavender-powder floral. That ambiguity is the entire idea, and it is one of the few genuinely unisex fragrances where the label is not marketing. It sits best in cooler air, which in South African terms means a Cape winter evening or a highveld night in July, when the powdery base has something to push against.

Performance is good rather than remarkable: six to eight hours on skin, with projection that is noticeable for the first two and intimate afterwards. As with the rest of Les Exclusifs it is sold in eau de parfum concentration. If you already own a classic fougère you may find Boy Chanel too polite; if you have always found fougères too harsh, this is the one that usually converts people.