Chanel Les Eaux

taking the waters

The Eaux are named after places of importance in Coco Chanel’s life. For example, Paris-Edimbourg (French for Edinburgh) recalls her affair with the Duke of Westminster and attendant holidays in Scotland. She was not overly fond of plebeian company, so the places are relentlessly chic: Biarritz in the Basque Country, Deauville in Normandy, Venice, the Riviera (French, one assumes, since the Italian side is vastly less posh), and of course Paris.

To me these fragrances remind me of the movable plaques that used to be hung from the side of trains, announcing that a carriage was bound for a different world. In that context, Paris-Edimbourg acquires an extra degree of strangeness, because there could never be such a train, and the imagination invents an interminably long tunnel under the North Sea. Paris-Paris suggests a strange getaway where the Train Bleu pulls out of the Gare de Lyon to a nearby siding, stays there long enough for supper, a nice sleep and breakfast, and then returns to the station, in what is, after all, the best possible destination. The stately serenity of the Chanel packaging tries to discourage whimsical thoughts, but human nature is rebellious.

The Eaux are deliberately light, transparent fragrances, a style that can be unforgiving unless materials and compositions are top-notch. I suppose the idea is to showcase the skill and high formula cost of Chanel’s perfumery. They are unquestionably refined, in the sense that no one wearing them will ever be accused of a lapse of judgment. If this sounds a little dull, it is. Smelling them one after the other is like turning the pages of one of those sample books of carpets resting on lecterns in the deserted home furnishings sections of good department stores.

There is not enough substance in most of the Eaux even for capsule reviews. Paris-Riviera is a citrus cologne; Paris-Paris is a light peppery rose; Paris-Deauville, a herbaceous orange accord, Paris-Venise, a quietly soapy neroli; Paris-Biarritz, a mandarin floral. The best of the lot, and not coincidentally the most complex and intense, is Paris-Edimbourg, a linden-tea composition with a lovely drydown that lifts it out of polite and into poetic territory.