Grace Kelly: Chanel Beige

Beige has gotten a bad reputation. It means boring, unsophisticated, commonplace. (In popular slang it has a synonym, "vanilla", something else that has been unfairly slammed as irredeemably dull and unadventurous.) But beige is the colour of high-quality unbleached wool or cotton. It's a pale, subtle, sophisticated colour in the yellow-orange part of the spectrum, and it can look much sharper than plain old white if it's used correctly. This is the essence of beige, and of Chanel's Beige: subtle suavity. The overall effect of Beige is actually blonde: Hitchcock blonde, in fact. It suggests the sort of cool, reserved woman, immaculately put together, who will nevertheless seduce you when and where she decides to. Beige calls all the shots.

It starts out bright and clean and a bit aldehydic, and my first impression of it, which has not diminished with repeated wearings, is that Beige is very, very Chanel, with all the polished French elegance that that suggests. There is a certain fruity-floral quality to the top, but the fruitiness comes from the flowers themselves: Beige is a white floral based largely on freesia and gardenia, and it smells so much of freesia for the first little while that I was reminded of Calvin Klein Eternity, which is also a white floral with lots of clean freesia, though Eternity of course went in a very different direction, the late-eighties scrubbed all-American style (which Klein spearheaded with Eternity and Escape) that was a reaction to the huge room-filling scents of the previous decade (which Klein also helped to make popular and profitable with his latecomer Obsession).

To the shiny (never quite sparkly) freesia of the opening, Beige adds a surprisingly restrained frangipani, nothing like the suffocating bouquets that most perfumes make of the flower. (This, in fairness, is hard to avoid, I think, because the tropical-greenhouse quality of frangipani, like gardenia and tuberose, has a tendency to dominate anything it touches.) Bathed in honey which becomes stronger as the scent evolves, it's the most subdued frangipani I've ever smelled, and I like it a lot, which surprised me, because I usually find it cloying or overwhelming. But this is the way of Beige: it's not for someone who would dance a (possibly drunken) flamenco in the middle of a restaurant, but instead presents the image of someone who is completely in control of herself (in public, anyway).

Eventually after the florals has died away, the honey is joined by a polished blonde wood; no lusty civet or dirty patchouli for this ice queen, nothing that suggests libido or carnality. It's relentlessly chic and aloof from start to finish.

Beige is the most recent addition to the Chanel collection Les Exclusifs, gigantic 200-mL bottles currently retailing for $190 U.S. There are twelve scents in the line, eight new (28 La Pausa, 31 Rue Cambon, Coromandel, Bel Respiro, Sycomore, Beige, No. 18, and Eau de Cologne) and four re-issues of discontinued or hard-to-find scents (Gardenia, Bois des Isles, Cuir de Russie, and No. 22). Let's see how many of them I can get to in September before I lose interest and wander off to something else.