Coromandel

Of everything in Les Exclusifs de Chanel, Coromandel is the one people buy blind and never regret. Its starting point is furniture. Gabrielle Chanel collected Coromandel lacquer screens and lined her rue Cambon apartment with them, and Chanel still quotes her on its own product page: "I almost fainted with happiness the first time I saw a Coromandel." The fragrance is an attempt to bottle the room those screens created rather than the screens themselves. No nose is credited. The work is generally assigned to Jacques Polge, who ran the fragrance studio when Les Exclusifs was created.

There is a brief citrus flicker at the start, bitter orange and neroli, and then it is gone and the real fragrance begins. Patchouli is the spine, but a patchouli scrubbed of its usual dirt and dampness, smoothed into something dark, dry and almost chocolatey. Orris adds a cool powder, rose and jasmine sit far in the background as texture rather than flowers. What makes Coromandel unusual is the base: benzoin and Tahitian vanilla give a resinous sweetness, incense and olibanum add a thin smoke, and there is a genuine white chocolate facet that appears about twenty minutes in and never fully leaves. Chanel's own summary, an intense ambery fragrance centred on patchouli, vanilla and benzoin, is exact.

It is a cold-weather and evening fragrance, and it is unisex in the way expensive things often are. On a dry Highveld winter night, worn under a jacket, it is close to perfect. In summer humidity it can become heavy and slightly syrupy, so scale back.

Performance is excellent and among the strongest in the Exclusifs line. The eau de parfum Chanel currently sells will give ten to twelve hours easily, projecting for the first two or three and then sitting in a warm cloud around you for the rest of the day. Scarves and coat collars will hold it for a week. This is one of the rare cases where a single spray genuinely is a dose, and where a bottle lasts a great deal longer than its size would suggest.