Chance Eau Vive

Chance is the Chanel that broke the house's own rules. Round bottle instead of rectangular, a name that suggests luck rather than authority, and a marketing line Chanel still prints on its product pages, attributed to Gabrielle Chanel: "I saw an opportunity, and I took it." Her point was that chance is something you make rather than something that happens to you. Eau Vive, released in 2015, is the most energetic reading in the family. Chanel credits no perfumer for it, and Olivier Polge is the name usually given.

The opening is the whole selling point. Grapefruit and blood orange, sharp and slightly bitter, with the rind quality left in rather than sanded down. It smells like citrus zest under a fingernail. Chanel's own description follows the arc precisely from there: a fresh citrus burst, a delicate jasmine heart, then a cedar and iris accord that gives the drydown its powdery restraint. In practice the jasmine is quiet, more a soft white-floral hum than an obvious flower, and white musk carries it. The cedar-iris close is dry, clean and faintly cool, which is what keeps Eau Vive from being just another pink fruity-floral.

It is a warm-weather fragrance and makes no pretence otherwise. On the humid KwaZulu-Natal coast in February it is one of the few things that stays legible when everything heavier turns thick. Daytime, weekends, gym bags, long drives.

Now the honest part, because it matters here more than with most Chanels. Eau Vive is sold only as an eau de toilette and it is the shortest-lived member of the Chance family. Expect roughly four to six hours, with the bright citrus attack gone inside forty-five minutes and the remaining hours spent as a soft musky-woody skin scent. Sillage is polite throughout. If you want the citrus effect to persist you will need to reapply after lunch, and the 150ml bottle exists partly because people do exactly that. Buy it for what it does well in the first hour rather than for endurance.