Coco Noir, Chanel’s magnetism at its peak. The story of the Chanel house is the story of Gabrielle Chanel, born in Saumur in 1883. At 18, this young orphan decided to move to Paris to try her luck. Her strength of character and determination revolutionized not only the world of fashion, but above all that of women.
Coco was born in 1984 from the hands and nose of Jacques Polge, the house perfumer of Chanel. Designed as the olfactory memory of Gabrielle Chanel’s baroque travels, Coco explored the unexplored at Chanel and turned deliciously spicy and oriental. Coco Noir is one of its brilliant descendants, this time exploring the masked and golden nights of Coco in Venice, those sublime and sparkling nights where black is more colorful than ever…
Coco Noir, or Gabrielle Chanel’s nocturnal Venetian travels
Every Chanel fragrance offers a tribute to the woman who was both the house’s creator and the spontaneous, bold and so charismatic muse of every Chanel creation, Coco, of course! Since her death, Chanel’s fragrant creations have borrowed from the great lady of fashion certain traits of her character or fragments of her life.
For Coco, Jacques Polge composed a fragrance that refers to the Venetian travels Gabrielle Chanel took at the time when she was living through the greatest tragedy of her life. The love of her life had just died and Coco went to Venice to try to forget her grief; she brought back no tears but her head full of Byzantine memories, which would influence her style for years.
To compose this lovely Coco Noir, Jacques Polge let himself be guided by the unprecedented glass bottle presented to him as well as by the very baroque inspirations of Coco, where black and gold reign supreme. The color black would become the olfactory mistress of this new fragrance, which would move much further away from Coco than Coco Mademoiselle had done a few years earlier.
Once I understood that I did not have to start again from the first Coco, I freed myself from those constraints and imagined something very different, attributed to Jacques Polge about Coco Noir by Chanel.
Coco Noir, a beautiful “nocturnal baroque” fragrance signed Chanel
Coco knew how to glorify spices, Coco Mademoiselle the delicate and spontaneous jasmine of the heart; Coco Noir, for its part, unveils itself in intense woody and musky depths. So in the end, Jacques Polge used certain bases from Coco while, for Coco Noir, giving free rein to nocturnal powers that the Chanel house had barely known until then.
Thus some of the citrus top notes of Coco are found again in this Coco Noir, though the orange has disappeared to make way for grapefruit and bergamot. As for the heart, Coco Noir has set aside the multi-faceted floral beauties of Coco to focus solely on jasmine and rose, nonetheless enhanced by a light velvety touch of peach. A fine hint of rose geranium comes to spice up the whole, preparing us for the intense depths that await.
Sandalwood from New Caledonia, patchouli from Indonesia, vetiver and cedar all come together, smoked in the thick, velvety cloud of incense. Night bewitches the notes of Coco Noir’s sillage, but Bourbon vanilla and tonka bean sweep us away one last time in their woody cloud, and there we are, bewitched!
I thus naturally moved toward an interpretation that I define as nocturnal, because I wanted it imbued with mystery, intensity, with that velvety sensation that wraps around you; but also with a sophistication, a light, capable of revealing the brilliance of that black, attributed to Jacques Polge for Coco Noir by Chanel.