August 12, 2016

Our editor shares her fall #TWTRspritz

Deborah Fulsang adds the new Chanel Boy perfume to her autumn fragrance rotation.

The masculinity woven throughout the Chanel brand and inherent within everything that Gabrielle Coco Chanel touched is what originally won my affection and what continues to hold it so many years later: The jersey appropriated from the marines, the sharp black and white palette, the classic chunky logos and packaging, the trousers, and of course the don’t-F-with-me attitude.

Hers was a modern mind. As was her approach to perfume, and the new Les Exclusifs fragrance from the house, Boy Chanel, embodies its founder’s sensibility perfectly.

The legendary Boy Capel inspires

This is a sexy scent inspired by Chanel’s one true love, Arthur Capel—better known as Boy Capel. It’s a fragrance that is meant to capture his elegance, his virility, his panache. And it’s a scent that I will be adding to my regular fragrance rotation this fall.

“The mark of a man on the skin of a woman”

Perfumer Olivier Polge said that he, like Chanel herself, was motivated by a “mix of genders. That unique fragrance of love when the other person’s scent permeates your skin and the fusion prevails over the original scent.”

Wow. Post-coital perfume. How sexy is that? That wonderful inbetween-ness when perfume meets cologne in a lovers’ embrace and melds to create something that smells of neither gender but of both, better than the sum of its aromatic parts.

Chanel Boy starts with a classic fougère

So Polge began with a typically masculine fougère and emphasized rose geranium with its hints of mint and rose and even dewy lychee. But this scent also possesses citrus zest—lemon and grapefruit—followed by rose and orange blossom, and a warm trail of sandalwood, almondy heliotropin, coumarin, vanilla and musk.

The great thing: Chanel Boy still smells like a Chanel perfume. There’s refinement and an undeniably feminine French je ne sais quoi about it. But there’s something earthier and sexy-man-just-out-of-a-shower cleanness in here too, which is delicious.

So count me in. Call it my fall #TWTRspritz.

After all, who doesn’t need a dose of Boy in their life—with all of the directness, charisma and impetuousness that comes along with that?