Chanel's regular designer line is polished, refined, and incredibly consistent. Les Exclusifs is where Chanel shows you what the house can really do. This is the collection I look at when I want to understand Chanel as a perfume house rather than simply Chanel as a designer brand. After going through inexpensive designers, clones, niche houses and artisan perfumery, I've gotten to the point where I'm looking for more than just something that smells good. I want character, construction, quality materials, and something that feels like there was an actual idea behind it. Les Exclusifs gives me much more of that. This isn't a collection built around chasing compliments or producing the loudest fragrance possible. A lot of these fragrances are about texture, elegance, and composition. Some are immediately beautiful, while others are the type of fragrances you appreciate more after spending time with them. COROMANDEL is probably one of the best examples of what this collection does well. Rich patchouli, woods, incense, and that almost chocolate-like warmth without turning into a typical sugary gourmand. It has depth and sophistication while still being wearable. LE LION DE CHANEL goes darker. Amber, leather, labdanum, smoke, and citrus come together in something that feels powerful and classical. This isn't the clean, safe Chanel people know from Bleu de Chanel. Le Lion has teeth. SYCOMORE is one of my favorites stylistically because it shows how Chanel can take something like vetiver and make it feel incredibly polished without stripping away its character. Dry, woody, smoky and earthy, but still unmistakably Chanel. BOY goes in another direction entirely. Aromatic lavender, musk and woods with an almost barbershop quality, but done with far more refinement than the typical modern fougère. Then you have fragrances such as BEIGE, 1957, GARDÉNIA, LA PAUSA, MISIA, 31 RUE CAMBON and CUIR DE RUSSIE, which show just how broad the collection really is. Florals, musks, aldehydes, leather, iris, woods — Chanel isn't locked into one modern commercial DNA here.

I am probably going to piss off some clone warriors with this one, but so be it. I can say this because I have been there. I chased everything. I owned hundreds of dupes and clones. I chased every new “95% identical” release, every beast-mode version and every $30 alternative that supposedly made the original obsolete. But I also chased every inexpensive designer brand I could find. Rack-store bargains, discounted designers, cheapies that somebody on YouTube said were hidden gems — if it was inexpensive and getting attention, I wanted to try it. Then I started doing the same thing with niche. I chased niche brands, affordable niche, hyped niche and whatever house everybody happened to be talking about that month. For a long time, the hobby became about the next bottle. And eventually I had to ask myself a question: Do I actually love perfumery, or do I just love collecting bottles? Because those are not necessarily the same thing. There is absolutely nothing wrong with buying affordable fragrances. There is nothing wrong with clones either. Some are excellent, some perform better than the original, and some are incredible values. But if your entire collection is built around copies of fragrances you have never even smelled, I have a hard time calling that a deep appreciation of perfumery. Especially when those same people turn around and say: “Why would anybody pay $300 for the original?” “The clone is better.” “It smells exactly the same.” “The original is a ripoff.” How do you know? You never smelled it. Watching a YouTube reviewer tell you something is 95% accurate does not mean you have experienced the original. And this is one of my biggest problems with clone culture. Somewhere along the way, price and performance became the only measurements of quality. If a fragrance costs $25 and lasts 12 hours, it is automatically considered better than a $250 fragrance that lasts seven. That makes absolutely no sense to me anymore. Perfumery is more than projection and longevity.

Didn’t post my SOTD this week because I gave this one a test drive Monday - Friday. My wife gifted me on Christmas last year the EDP and I like it a lot, but this one IMO is better than the OG. More deeper, richer and denser than the OG, lasts and projected how a Parfum supposed to work, in some days it lasted on my clothe for an entire day, on those days it lasted on my skin for like 7-8 hours, projecting solid for the first 2. Some days the weather was very hot and humid and I sweat a lot and it didn’t last on skin & neither on clothe for more than 3-4 hours. But that is why I wanted to try it for a full week with different scenarios and get to know the fragrance. This one is new to my collection and I give it an 8/10, more suited for evening occasions and cooler weather because of the richer and amber but also an easy signature scent and a year round fragrance.