"You have to build that link with your memory and then organize your family of smell, which is quite subjective." "Something touched my sensibilities." That's what makes a great perfumer, he adds - not a sense of smell, necessarily, but rather the emotional response and connection to scent.
"It was a turning point," said Polge, who discovered a love for sandalwood and bergamot. His predecessor was his father, Jacques Polge, but the junior Polge's interest in perfume didn't arrive until a summer internship during "university" at the senior Polge's Chanel fragrance lab. Dressed in a yellow-khaki pants, a white button down, and a navy sports jacket, he's only the fourth "nose" to helm perfumes at the luxury fashion house. In Miami during Art Basel to celebrate the fragrance's centennial, Polge is seated oceanside in a suite at the Faena Hotel on South Beach. Most recently, Polge developed L'Eau ($108) in 2016 as a "casual" interpretation. Since then, there have been five iterations of the scent. The result was a mix of natural and artificial scents ("synthetic molecules called aldehydes," explained the brand) that captured and embodied Chanel's style and presence. Created by Gabrielle Chanel in 1921 in an attempt to redefine women's fragrances - similar to how her clothing reimagined style - she asked her perfumer, Ernest Beaux, to concoct something different than the single-note floral aromas that were on the market at the time. 5 that keeps it relevant," said Olivier Polge, Chanel's head perfumer since 2015, on why the scent has remained iconic for 100 years. "There's a richness and mystery that you'll never totally understand to Chanel No.