Chanel Le Lion De Chanel Review – Olivier Polge; 2020

This year’s series of Love At First Scent got off to a promising start (as long as you don’t count the dodgy sound) with a review of Le Lion De Chanel, the Olivier Polge composition originally released in the Middle East during the first few months of 2020. If you’d like to watch the video, here’s a link: Chanel Le Lion De Chanel review. And for more thoughts on the scent, keep reading.

Let’s get the easy bit out of the way first: to my nose, there’s no doubt that Le Lion is beautiful. Think of any feline-esque compliment and it’ll probably fit the scent well. It purrs. It slinks around as though it owns every bit of space it inhabits. It’s cuddly and inviting. It doesn’t mind baring its claws now and then. It possesses magnetic, sinewy, authoritative power.

On a technical level, the balance between its disparate elements is a thrill to behold, especially at the beginning. That interplay between the bergamot and the lemon (reminiscent not just of Guerlain Shalimar but also of the much-missed Shalimar Eau Legere). The confidence with which the Cuir De Russie-inspired suede note shimmers into view. The sublime, earthy, Coromandel-echoing patchouli. Sorry to repeat myself, but there’s no other word for it: they all lock into place and PURR with the most perfect harmony. It’s shivers-down-your-spine stuff.

But here’s a crucial question: does Le Lion say anything we haven’t heard before? Or, to put it a different way, where is its place in perfumery? Some have suggested that it fills a Guerlain-shaped hole in Chanel’s output, but perhaps that was a hole that didn’t need filling (or maybe it was already filled by Misia and Boy). After all, Chanel’s strength has always stemmed from doing its very own chic, well-tailored, haute-French thing. Others have asked if Le Lion is meant to address the oud gap in the brand’s catalogue, and I wonder if this might not be a more rewarding way of understanding it.

Let’s get one thing clear in case you start panicking: this is not an oud scent. But by channelling Emeraude–Shalimar-Lutensian ‘orientals’ more overtly than perhaps any other Chanel composition, it does seem to want to flirt with Arabia. I have no problem with that whatsoever, and I respect the brand’s decision to entice Gulf customers without resorting to an out-and-out oud scent (not that I have any issue with oud either, as regular readers will know full well).

I’d say there’s nothing wrong with a perfumer setting themselves a creative parameter in the form of an imagined, potential buyer. Indeed, limits and parameters often lead to great work: they focus the mind and ensure that the fundamental idea of any given project is always kept in sharp view. A measured lack of liberty frequently sparks tremendous artistry.

So perhaps Polge set himself the task (or had it imposed upon him…?) of putting together an oud-free, Middle-East-friendly perfume. If so, it stands to reason that he may well have decided that ‘amber’ was the way to go: as a genre, this has long been known to perform well at the malls in Dubai. He would then have been just a few steps away from ruminating on the structures of the aforementioned Shalimar, Coromandel and Cuir De Russie. And perhaps that’s when he experienced a flash of genius: the idea of trying to find a territory overlapped by those three masterpieces that had yet to be explored.

I’d say he’s met his objective and that, consequently, Le Lion does have something new to say. Or to be more precise, it presents a picture we’ve seen before from a novel perspective. If it were a frame in a movie, it wouldn’t be the face-on close-up of Shalimar. It wouldn’t be the longer, more high-angled, slow-moving point of view of Coromandel. And it wouldn’t be the ground-level, tracking shot of Cuir De Russie, emphasising every step of the protagonist’s walk across a white, Doctor Zhivago landscape. Le Lion is the deep focus mid-shot, giving equal weight to all the elements on the screen, allowing the viewer to take in a wealth of details, holding everything in fine equilibrium. And making us see things we’ve seen before in an unexpected way is no mean feat, which is why I’m delighted to declare this latest Chanel one of their most laudable successes; perhaps their greatest success so far in the 21st century.

Persolaise

[Chanel Le Lion De Chanel review based on a sample of eau de parfum provided by the brand in 2021.]

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