Chanel Is Launching a New Chance Perfume, Eau Splendide

Five is an auspicious number in the world of Chanel. So when it came time to expand the beloved Chance fragrance family, one of the best-selling women’s scent franchises in the world, the brand turned once again to in-house perfumer-creator Olivier Polge. “There is something optimistic about Chance,” he tells Bazaar. His latest creation? Eau Splendide, out this April, a floral-woody perfume that is also the fruitiest Chance yet.

Eau Splendide is centered on a red-raspberry accord and balanced by geranium from flowers grown by the brand in Grasse, France. A distilled sandalwood note adds a casual, grounding base to the soft yet enveloping perfume. Bazaar sat down with Polge exclusively to get all the details on what is sure to be this season’s most anticipated perfume launch.

What do you love about the Chance franchise, and how do you see it within the context of the other Chanel scents? Is it younger? Fresher? Or more of a state of mind?

It started off in 2003. For the people who don’t know it as well as you, I always remind them that it is made of five totally different perfumes. You could look for certain raw materials in common, but I think that’s going down the wrong path. I think they all share the same spirit. I like the freshness. I think they are very colorful. They are very bright. They are direct. At the end of the day, perfume is not intellectual. You have to feel something about it; you have to feel a bond to a scent. And with this Chance, I think this bond builds quickly. It’s true that there is a youthfulness to it, but I’d much rather think about the state of mind. I think that it goes beyond any real age.

Courtesy of Chanel Beauty

Olivier Polge with a bottle of Eau Spendide

Walk me through making the composition of this scent. Was there a feeling or specific type of woman you had in mind?

There was no specific woman in mind. I think the line of Chance is very strong. And even though I started off with a white piece of paper in terms of formula, I had those four other Chance bottles on my desk. I was looking for ingredients that would have this same boost of freshness. For the top note, I was looking for a fruit that would have a comparable pitch and hook to the other fragrances. The original Chance is made with a lot of pink pepper. Chance Eau Fraîche has many citrus notes, so this is how I fell into the red-berries note. Little by little, I developed this accord of raspberry, which has a high pitch and is very fruity. But what I found interesting was the day there was a rosy undertone, something slightly violet—and this was the start of an interesting perfume.

So then, I developed the floralcy around the geranium, an important raw material at Chanel. It’s one of the very few ingredients that we even grow by ourselves in the South of France, in Grasse, and it leaves a rosy floral—but in a more simple way, maybe more casual way, something more fluid, which I think went very well in the composition. In the base, there is a sandalwood that plays an important role. It’s sandalwood that is slightly distilled, cleaned up a little bit from every darker aspect the wood would usually have. In other words, I tried to gather those key elements in such a way that none of them would bring any shade into this colorful fragrance.

I find the raspberry accord really interesting. You talked about the pitch of it, but how would you describe it in relation to other fruity notes found in perfume?

I thought that it would be the top note, but at the end of the creation of the scent, it takes much more room than I thought at the beginning. It is made of red-berry-type notes, also black currant, and there is a slight bitterness of rose and the warmth of violet.

Courtesy of Chanel Beauty

Coming April 15: Chanel’s newest version of Chance, called Eau Splendide

That makes sense, because when I think raspberry, I think a little sweet, but there’s also a tartness to it.

It’s not too fruity and not too sweet at all. I was not falling into a vanilla type of fragrance, right? It has the right balance of being a fresh fruit and enveloping at the same time.

Can you tell me a little bit more about taking the darkness out of the wood you mentioned?

At Chanel, we create and manufacture our perfumes. So we have done a lot of work on raw materials. It’s like a second distillation, and you can select the aspect that you prefer in the essential oil. So in sandalwood, typically, there is something very dry—maybe a little too dry—that sometimes smells like paper, like pencils. By this distillation, I tried to clean up this aspect a little bit to be softer. It allowed me to have a quite new tonality in the background.

How does Eau Splendide stack up to the other four Chance scents on your desk?

I wanted it to compare well in terms of color, diffusion, and freshness but also differentiate [Eau Splendide] from the others. I think it has to stand on its own. I think that it’s the most fruity of the five—a fruity floral.

Did you have a color in mind when developing the juice?

No. At the end, when I finished the formula, we decided by smelling it. If you picture a mixture of raspberry and geranium, it evokes this purple-violet thing. I think that for perfume to be successful, everything has to be relevant and combined well together, so we developed the color at the end.

Chance has been around for over 20 years. How do you see the Chance franchise growing or evolving for the next 20 years?

I like this sentence from Gabrielle Chanel when she says, “Fashion changes all the time, but style stays.” So, I think there are new ways to express the idea [of Chance]. And I also like to think that you could say it in many different ways. I cannot foresee what will happen in the 20 following years. There are many ways of expressing your style at one period of time. I think such a fresh and colorful fragrance has words to say.

Chanel Chance Eau Splendide will be available on April 15 at Chanel boutiques and on chanel.com.

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