Perfume review - Chanel Coco - Jacques Polge; 1984

Chanel's most baroque perfume celebrates its 40th birthday

Forty years is certainly more than long enough for friendship to turn into profound affection. And it is affection of the deepest kind that is evoked by a scent with which I’ve been on friendly terms ever since it emerged four decades ago: Chanel Coco, originally composed by the in-house perfumer at the time, Jacques Polge.

It’s currently cool to be dismissive of Coco, in much the same way that it’s deemed acceptable to be snooty about Chance. Curiously, there’s a whiff of ageism in the attitude towards both those fragrances. In the case of the latter, the main criticism is that the scent is too air-headedly youthful (whatever that means). And Coco is often damned with that most disparaging of labels: old-fashioned. But this refusal to see beyond the features that mark it as a 1980s creation is unfair, and it reveals more about the critic than it does about the subject.