Paris-Deauville

In 1913 Gabrielle Chanel opened her first boutique in Deauville, on the Normandy coast, and sold women sportswear made from jersey - a fabric then used for men's underwear. The striped mariniere and the tweeds that became house signatures both trace back to that seaside season. Chanel launched Les Eaux de Chanel in 2018 as a set of light eaux named for the places she loved, and Paris-Deauville was among the first. It is commonly attributed to Olivier Polge, the house's in-house perfumer since 2015.

Chanel calls it the fragrance of the open air, and that is accurate to the point of being modest. It opens as a proper cologne - Sicilian orange, lime, bergamot, lemon, petitgrain - then does something unusual by pushing basil forward. Basil is a herb that smells green, slightly aniseed, faintly peppery, and it gives the citrus a garden-hedge quality rather than a fruit-bowl one. Hedione and a thin jasmine keep it airy through the middle, and a light patchouli grounds it at the end. There is no sweetness anywhere in it.

It is unisex in the plainest sense, and it is a hot-weather fragrance above all else. Cape Town in a southeaster, a Saturday morning market, the first hour after a swim. It is also one of the easier Chanels to wear to work, because nobody has ever been irritated by a stranger smelling of citrus and herbs. Chanel sells a matching body lotion, and layering is not a marketing add-on here - it is the practical answer to the fragrance's one real limitation.

The limitation, predictably, is staying power. This is an eau de toilette built almost entirely on citrus and green notes, and it behaves like one: three to five hours at best, with the brightest phase lasting under an hour and modest projection throughout. Spray generously and expect to reapply. What you are buying is quality of materials and a very particular kind of clean, not staying power. Judged as a cologne rather than a signature scent, it is excellent.