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An exercise in illusion via allusion.
Wear it and after a few hours you will find your daily life suffused by the same feeling of peace you get when you settle into an armchair after tidying your apartment from end to end.
If you think of all the best Chanel fragrances as varieties of little black dress - sleek, dependable, perfectly proportioned - Bois des iles is the one in cashmere. I have worn it on and off for years, whenever I felt I needed extra insulation from the cold world.
To my nose Chinatown ( Bond No. 9 ) smells like a corner of a small French grocery in summer, in the exact spot where the smell of floor wax meets that of ripe peaches.
Lignin, the stuff that prevents all trees from adopting the weeping habit, is a polymer made up of units that are closely related to vanillin. When made into paper and stored for years, it breaks down and smells good. Which is how divine providence has arranged for secondhand bookstores to smell like good quality vanilla absolute, subliminally stoking a hunger for knowledge in all of us.
Perfume is, among other things, the most portable form of intelligence.
Oman was making perfumes when Europeans only bathed once a year on doctor's orders.
Chanel No. 5 is a Brancusi.
The beauty and fragrance industry has lied to women for so long, convincing us to fork over cash for crud in shiny packages, that at this point event pure quality has trouble getting taken seriously. Clever marketing can get us to buy something once, but rarely again. We don't wear Chanel No. 5 because Marilyn Monroe wore it, we wear it for the same reason that Marilyn did: because it''s gorgeous.
Sycomore, Chanel. If putting it on does not make you shiver with pleasure, see a doctor.
Aside from beautiful aircraft, nuclear power stations, food and wine, perfumery is France's biggest export, yet there is no perfume museum in Paris.
The ability possessed by certain fragrances to briefly turn the most arid mind into a fairy garden, to make us lament the passing of loves and losses we know full well we never had, is a miracle specific to perfumery.
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