Chanel Comète is the latest fragrance in the Les Exclusifs de Chanel line of house scents. Comprised of rare ingredients, each evokes a chapter from the life of Gabrielle Chanel. This includes 1957, the year that Mme Chanel received the Neiman Marcus Fashion Award, and Boy Chanel, inspired by her first love, Boy Capel. All are created by nose Olivier Polge, who became the fourth in-house perfumer in the history of Chanel. (Polge’s predecessor is his father Jacques Polge, who steered the olfactory ship from 1978 until his son took the wheel).
Comète tells the story of a particular piece of fine jewellery, the ‘Comète’ necklace, part of the 1932 collection ‘Bijoux de Diamants’, which celebrated Gabrielle Chanel’s obsession with stars and constellations. ‘I wanted to cover women in constellations. Stars! [...] See these comets, where the head glitters on a shoulder, and the sparkling tail slips behind the shoulders to fall back down in a shower of stars on the chest,’ she said about the design.
In turn, Polge has created a floral and luminous perfume that captures the scent of stardust on your skin, with delicate accords of cherry blossom and musk, fusing with notes of heliotrope and iris.
Here, he sits in conversation with photographer and Chanel muse Laura Bailey, to discuss his creative process and why he believes in destiny.
Chanel Comète: Olivier Polge and Laura Bailey discuss the new Les Exclusifs fragrance
Laura Bailey: Shall we start with your earliest memory of Chanel?
Olivier Polge: My first memory of Chanel begins at the age of four. My father had been working at Chanel since then. But, following in his footsteps was never my lifelong dream, to start with. As, a teenager I wanted to do everything else but perfume! My passion when I was a teenager was music. It started with electric guitar and it ended up with classical piano.
LB: You have talked about perfume being like a ‘composition’. I wanted to ask you, do you approach the creation of fragrance with a scientific mindset or that of an artist?
OP: I think that these two worlds don’t contradict each other. With any artistic expression, you have to have a certain technique behind you. Painters have to know about anatomy, maybe about pigments. And I have my technique as well. And it has to be very precise, the same way that a music score is very precise.
LB: Gabrielle Chanel described fragrance as an expression of style. Are you always imagining the whole world of Chanel when you create perfume?
OP: Gabrielle Chanel brought a lot of newness into the world of perfume. You must remember that she was the first fashion designer to come up with a scent under her name. At that time, the very famous fashion designer was Paul Poiret. He understood there was a link between clothing and perfume, but he created a separate brand, Les Parfums de Rosines, taking his daughter’s name. Chanel brought into perfume the idea of expressing the style of the house. Before then, perfumers and fashion designers were completely two separate worlds. When she met the nose Ernest Beaux, who created Chanel No. 5, she made a parallel with her designing clothes, combining fabrics, and so on.
LB: On that note, can you talk through the inspirations for Comète?
OP: First off, I had this image of a stardust. Perfume-wise, it was interesting because I would describe it as very powdery and very luminous at the same time. Which in perfume is a strange combination; it sounds like a contradiction. The easy way would have been to create something around vanilla. But I thought, let’s do something differently and combine multiple raw materials that have one powdery facet. So, in Comète, the scent of heliotrope is flowery and very powdery. Iris is powdery and woody. Cherry blossom has a very almond-like note.
LB: Can we talk about what you think have been the main innovations in your craft and how you and Chanel are working to safeguard those skills and invest in the future?
OP: Technology is in everything we do. And there is a real technology linked to the extraction of scents. At Chanel, we have our extraction factory in the south of France, where we extract many raw materials that we grow by ourselves, or even that we source in different parts of the world. So, we try, in terms of preservation, to follow all the stages from the flower to the bottle in the making of a perfume. Behind everything Chanel does, whether the fashion, fine jewellery and watches, or the perfume, it is about the making and the craft.
LB: I have been wearing Comète for a week or so now. It is a fragrance that evolves. It seems to change with my mood, with my day, and it feels like mine. Is this what you set out to achieve?
OP: I’m glad to hear this because this is the perfect alchemy between someone and the perfume. I think I could try to explain, that within all the fragrances in Chanel Les Exclusifs, there is a certain faceted level of density and complexity. This develops an intimacy between the wearer and the scent. When the scents are too simple, maybe you get tired of them. But this should be a long, complicated relationship.
LB: I suppose this relates to Comète in the broader sense, through stars and astrology. But do you feel a sense of destiny in the process of perfume making? Do you feel maybe an outcome is divine?
OP: I believe in magical things; I love to see when things combine perfectly. Comète so happens to be the 19th edition in the Les Exclusifs range and the day of Gabrielle Chanel’s birth is the 19th day in August, for example. This just happens to be a coincidence. So yes, I do believe there is a sense of destiny here.
Comète is available from 3 May 2024, priced at £215 for 75ml and £380 for £200ml.
