Bel Respiro

These magnificent bottles entered the Chanel Les Exclusifs collection. A pure creation by Jacques Polge, Bel Respiro offers the olfactory rendering of the bucolic Parisian retreat in which Coco loved so much to take refuge…

Chanel returns to the Parisian countryside for a springtime breath named Bel Respiro

For Gabrielle Chanel, a woman of the world and of the upper echelons of fashion, Paris is a city of dreams but also a city where she sometimes felt trapped between the desire to be natural and the near-essential need to “appear”. It was in the countryside that she found her refuge, first in Garches, in 1920, by buying the house she nicknamed Bel Respiro, then in 1928 in Roquebrune Cap Martin, in the property she had built, La Pausa. Two emblematic places that so strongly inspired the creativity of Jacques Polge that he made two magnificent perfumes from them. One extolling a tender springtime green, Bel Respiro, and the other extolling iris and its two contrasting faces, La Pausa.

Bel Respiro, a perfume released in the Les Exclusifs collection in 2007, offers a journey into the flowering and soothing grounds of Gabrielle Chanel's property. Yet the naturalness and restraint of these flowers is also tinged with a touch of chic, expressed through powerful leather notes, which gives this Bel Respiro an atmosphere at once very romantic and always very chic, very Coco in short! As an ideal fragrance of freshness and refinement, as Chanel describes it…

Chanel Bel Respiro between the floral freshness of spring and the elegance of leathery notes

If Coco so enjoyed taking refuge in her lost paradise at the heart of the Parisian countryside, it was in part for the floral scents that surrounded her property and came to intoxicate her. It is also said that it was at Bel Respiro that she took her first lessons in elegance, an elegance expressed through the leathery power of the whole.

Thus Bel Respiro opens with fresh, aromatic top notes composed of thyme, basil and rosemary, enhanced with a touch of galbanum to reinforce the freshness of this opening with a hint of sharp power tinged with earthy notes. At the heart, Jacques Polge brings out a very green note of cut grass, rather rare in a Chanel perfume, which, enhanced with jonquil and floral notes, becomes light, bucolic softness. Finally, the restraint of this beautifully bucolic perfume plunges into depths of leather and garrigue, giving these flowers a refined and assertive power, like the striking personality of Mademoiselle Coco.

Bel Respiro is the luminous evocation of an ideal spring with its green grass, its crumpled leaves, its light breeze. A tender green and idyllic floral, an absolute of freshness and refinement. Chanel on Bel Respiro.