There is a painting on the wall behind Olivier Polge, and it is abstract. I notice it twenty minutes into my conversation with Chanel’s renowned nose, at the precise moment we seem to have run out of vocabulary for how a perfume can have a deep effect on a person. He notices me noticing. “It’s abstract art,” he says, with the pleasure of a man who has found the analogy he was hunting for, “and I think that perfume is very abstract in a certain sense as well.” This seems to be the way Polge thinks: obliquely, with layers of nuances and meaning, and almost an intention to never let anything resolve too neatly.

It’s a characteristic that perhaps is what distinguishes him as such a successful and prolific perfumer-creator, having created iconic scents like Chanel No. 5 L’Eau, Boy and Misia for Chanel in the past, as well as other global perfume phenomena such as Flowerbomb and La Vie est Belle. Undoubtedly it’s what makes him the ideal person to take up the challenge of reimagining Coco Mademoiselle, one of Chanel’s most beloved scents for a quarter of a century. It would be easy to imagine that the brief to reimagine this fragrance would be a daunting one for almost anyone. There are women who have worn Coco Mademoiselle since Jacques Polge—Olivier’s father—first composed it in 2001, and a generation arriving now who have never owned a bottle. Polge began by refusing to split the difference. “I started off really thinking about a whole new formula.” Then the DNA asserted itself. “The spirit of Coco Mademoiselle, certain aspects of the formula, the woods, and the ambery notes, are so specific that at the end, if you think about all the DNA of the brand, it was close enough.”

But Polge admits that one ingredient did become the foundational building block for Crush Absolu. “I was thinking about vanilla, and this is really how I started,” he recalls. “Sometimes there are little moments when you see that there is something obvious, and usually it’s a strong idea.”

What that translates to in terms of an olfactory profile is a fragrance that more fully embraces the profound aspects of the original, creating deeper woods, richer ambers, and something that feels lush—a sensual scent evolution. “I was thinking about creating a scent that would express a similar feeling with a new scent,” explains Polge, “and from a woody, warm perfume, I went much further into ambery perfume.” The thread back is material rather than sentimental: “I wanted to add some of those patchouli ingredients that obviously create this link with the original formula.”

Officially, Crush Absolu belongs to the intense ambery family: grapefruit and lychee opening with a brightness bordering on impertinence, rose and jasmine at its heart, patchouli anchoring the base, threaded with vanilla and vetiver. The bottle is a departure too—the familiar architecture given a contrasting label and a faceted cap that catches light like cut stone. And with the launch of any major new fragrance, a fresh-faced muse is also a must. Chanel smartly tapped the Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Gracie Abrams to be its ambassador. Her youthful, unfussed candour is an ideal fit for a scent that is all about revealing (as one does when they write a song) rather than pleasing. Polge, who has spent his career having to answer the same generic questions about the composition of each scent he has created over the years, admits that it’s true there are some who just want the facts and seem to not be interested in the more nuanced aspects of the scent story he is trying to tell. “There are certain people, they want to always fall into the same type of description: top, middle, bottom.” But for this perfumer-creator the real interest in any fragrance comes from the appealing friction that can be found when notes come together, particularly in Crush Absolu. “The contrast, to make it simple, is between the fruits that are really very powerful and jump at you, very fresh, and the depth of the amber, and I think that’s what makes it interesting.” When I suggest what he really enjoys is creating an olfactory push and pull with this perfume, he agrees immediately: “There is a tension that I like.”

This idea of finding pleasure inside contrasts seems to be something of a cornerstone in the impressive career Polge has built over the years. It surfaces again when I ask which ingredient he cannot quit. “I clearly have a very dear taste for iris,” he confesses. Days before we spoke, he shared that he had pulled the iris out of a formula he was working on, purely to see what would happen. Why iris? He struggles, then arrives somewhere lovely. “It doesn’t jump at your nose, but as you wear it, it brings a darker shade to a perfume that makes it interesting. A texture that is soft, that I think embellishes every perfume.” A little darkness, I offer. “There always has to be a little contrast,” he replies. For Polge, fragrance has been a way of life long before it became his calling. After all, he grew up watching his father create one award-winning scent after another while he served as the nose for Chanel for 37 years, until he retired in 2015. Polge recalls an old interview in which his father sorted the house’s output with astute simplicity – the florals on one side, No. 5 among them, and the baroque perfumes on the other, led by the original Coco. “In this second category, I thought there was something new to do, something more vanilla, more enveloping, that was missing,” says Polge about how he came to the idea of reframing Coco Mademoiselle.

As to how he thinks his new fragrance will be received in the Middle East, Polge is excited to hear the feedback from a place that is so steeped in the heritage of scents. For him the Gulf is “one of the few regions in the world that has its own taste for perfumes,” and he relishes the perfume maximalism that is found here: “I love that people will end up putting a fragrance on their clothes, on their skin, on their hair. So there is a richness, there is a tradition, there is their own taste,” he says.

Polge suspects Crush Absolu will find success here because of its base—”you are just one step away from certain spices, certain woods”—but he isn’t interested in catering to the olfactory preferences of one part of the world. “I consider that Chanel is a French brand with European tradition, and we have to stay grounded in that.” How anyone layers the result is none of his business, and he seems delighted about how women will experiment with this new scent. “A fashion designer will never know how people will mix and match. And at the end of the day, I don’t know either. You cannot ask everyone to fragrance themselves the same way.”

I ask what he wants the women who discover Crush Absolu for the first time to take away from that experience, and he offers a confession. “Speaking about scents, describing scents, I always feel powerless,” he admits. But what he wants most is not comprehension but collision: “I would love people to strike something in their sensibilities, and that’s the strength of perfume,” he says with an elegant turn of phrase that only a Frenchman can pull off. Which emotion, exactly? He won’t be pinned down. “I don’t know which emotion, but at least I hope it will procure emotion.”