No. 22 Parfum (1922)
by Chanel

I finally got my bottle of #22. All I can say i am so disappointed. Maybe a vintage bottle would be better. This smells like Final Net hair spray. I couldn’t wash it off quickly enough. I like the vintage Extrait of # 5 and I like the #5 Premier but this is sadly disappointing.

The jasmine was the first thing that I noticed with this one. Feminine, but can be pulled off by a confident fellow. A nice dose of ylang-ylang and rose is in this also. Slightly soapy and lasts all day. Pretty good.

In my non-perfume life, I'm a music producer and studio engineer, so I'm kind of a nerd about how music sounds (stick with me, this will be about perfume eventually...) In the 70's and 80's, music was generally mixed with a lot of midrange, with the highs and bass quieter in the mix. Now, years later, tastes have changed and music is released with loud highs and bass, with the midrange turned down. So, in order to fit with current tastes, old music is often "Digitally Remastered", which basically means that they turn down the midrange and turn up the bass and highs. When done poorly, this can make old songs sound shrieky and shrill and weirdly loud but still kind of hollow.

So, back to No. 22. It reminds me of a "Digital Remaster" of No. 5. It's got the same basic ingredients as No. 5, but with the highs turned up, so the powdery aldehydes are amplified into a loud blast while the flowers and wonderful No. 5 base get kind of lost. Meanwhile, the pink pepper and peach which are buried deep in No. 5 come to the forefront in No. 22, giving it a subtle whiff of "cheapness" while a lot of the beauty gets lost in the shrill powder.

All that being said, even a weirdly remixed version of No. 5 is better than 95% of the perfumes out there, so I still feel like I owe No. 22 a thumbs up, but I'd never buy a bottle of this when I could just wear No. 5 extrait...

A Basenoter sent me a sample of No. 22, perhaps a version from before the exclusive line was released, and it's a great Chanel fragrance as I have come to expect; a variation on Chanel No. 5, of which there are several, and this one is impeccable.

Damn Chanel and their absolute perfection in almost everything they do. Damn them all. I sprayed this on almost carelessly today, in a take-it-or-leave-it frame of mind, and prepared to go about my day. And then . . . No 22 snuck up and got me. I got past the aldehydes. I even made it beyond the tuberose (don't get me wrong; with tuberose in the mix, that stinky Chanel jasmine growls like Billie Holliday--very hard to pass up). Somewhere in there, as the heart was slipping away and the drydown began to emerge, the aldehydes kept bubbling, and I smelled something I haven't smelled in a long time . . . .

Years ago, I was judging a wine competition for a big city paper. We tasted everything blind, with only general categories to go by. This is really less fun than it sounds; after three days straight, you're out of your mind and just want a beer or something. On the last day, our table had the bubbles--*all* the bubbles. We had made it through a raft of what were clearly domestics, Prosecci, Cavas, whatever. All (well, most) pleasant, but only just. My head hurt and my notes got incoherent. Then the server came around with another set of glasses, and I remember picking one up and smelling, just for off notes--and this almost horrifically plush, luxuriant, rich, spicy, funky aroma bubbled up and grabbed me, and wouldn't me let go. I tried to set the glass down calmly and put my game face back on, but that glass sat there, sending the occasional bubble drifting up its side like it wanted my attention. Of course it was champagne, the first real champagne of the day, from a noble champagne house, with a distinct house style. I finally tasted it, politely spat the first sip, as you do in these things, and then held back my glass--no way was that server taking my good champagne away from me that day. In my accompanying notes to the gold medal our team awarded the house for their excellent juice, I compared the champagne to a Chanel suit. Well.

No. 22 smells like that champagne smelled. It has the vanilla and spice of the cask, the indole of the dead lees, the richness and florals and acid of the grapes in the ylang and tuberose and jasmine, the talc of the limestone soil in the iris, and of course it has the bubbles in the aldehydes. But like champagne, it's so much more than the sum of its parts: it's yeasty, it's funky, and it tickles. The texture is right. All the great champagne houses keep a huge barrel of ancient, oxidized wine on the premises for blending purposes: you wouldn't want to drink it, but a little of this goes into every bottle of new wine. The new wine needs this stuff to carry the house DNA; with it, it has that distinct taste of controlled spoilage that makes so many French things so good. No. 22 has that in spades: it's a pure expression of the mother house, and it's as close as you can get in perfumery to real-deal, old-school champagne--champagne you can wear. Champagne conjured from flowers, or the idea of flowers.

Damn Chanel. Seriously. No. 22 hijacked my day, and my carefully planned wish list. I guess it's what you call one of those good problems . . . .