Chanel Paris-St. Moritz, for people who prefer winter to the Riviera

Les Eaux de Chanel have always been summer perfumes to me. Biarritz, Deauville, Venice, the Riviera. Fresh, bright, made for linen shirts and long lunches.

Now Chanel has done something I did not expect. It has gone to the mountains.

Paris-St. Moritz, as The Moodie Davitt Report announced on 2 November, is the first winter inspired fragrance in the Les Eaux de Chanel collection. It is available now in travel retail around the world.

Gabrielle Chanel on the snow

The inspiration is personal. From the late 1920s, Gabrielle Chanel spent winters in St. Moritz, skiing and enjoying winter sports with her circle of friends. Her way of dressing for the mountains, practical, elegant, freed from the stiffness of the time, is the other half of the inspiration.

Olivier Polge, Chanel's perfumer, describes it beautifully. Days in the snow stretching late into the evening in hotel salons. For her, he says, St. Moritz represented "a form of inner elevation. Life, stripped of the superfluous."

That phrase could describe the whole Chanel aesthetic.

Three notes, nothing more

Polge built the perfume around three main notes: pear, rose and a musky amber accord.

In his words, the pear brings "a green, juicy freshness". The rose, made with fresh nuances, reveals "spicy, mineral, sometimes abstract facets". And the musky amber notes, "round and enveloping, finally settle the warmth of the fragrance on the skin".

What he wanted, he says, was warmth without heaviness. "Something soft, cocooning." The feeling of wearing a beloved garment. Not to reproduce what a place smells like, but what it awakens.

I like that he refused the obvious. There is no pine, no snow accord, no smoke from a chalet fire. Just the warmth you look for when it is cold.

Les Eaux de Chanel, briefly

The collection was launched in 2018. It is a line of fresh, luminous fragrances inspired by eaux de Cologne and by the places that shaped Gabrielle Chanel's life.

Before St. Moritz there were Paris-Biarritz, Paris-Deauville, Paris-Venise, Paris-Riviera, Paris-Edimbourg and Paris-Paris. Every one of them is a trip with Gabrielle.

Curious facts

• Olivier Polge is the son of Jacques Polge, who was Chanel's perfumer for more than three decades. The house has had only a handful of in house perfumers in its whole history.
• Gabrielle Chanel opened her first fashion boutique on the Normandy coast, in Deauville, in 1913. That is why Deauville is part of this collection.
• St. Moritz claims to be the birthplace of winter tourism, since 1864. Chanel was in very good company.

I also like what it says about the collection. After six summer journeys, Les Eaux de Chanel now have a full year, and the next destination is anyone's guess.

Where to find it in Portugal

The launch began in travel retail, so Lisbon and Porto airports are the first places I would look. In the city, Chanel fragrances are available at the Chanel perfume space at El Corte Inglés in Lisbon, which carries the house's perfumes including the exclusive collections. Ask there when Paris-St. Moritz arrives in Portuguese stores.

My take

Lisbon does not have real winters, and I am grateful for that. But we have grey January afternoons, wind from the Atlantic and evenings when you want something warmer on your skin.

Paris-St. Moritz is made for those evenings. It is a winter perfume for people who do not live in the snow, and I think that is its intelligence. It brings the feeling of the mountain, not its temperature.

For people who prefer winter to the Riviera, or simply want both in their wardrobe, Chanel has finally made the eau for the cold.