Well, for us, Chanel Allure Homme Sport Eau Extreme is a bit of contradiction.  

Housed in a chunky, solid, matt-silver flacon (which we like), Chanel Allure Homme Sport Eau Extreme's overriding scents are twofold: first, fresh cut wood, and second... domestic cleaning products. And it is quite delicious.   Guess we'd better explain ourselves.

Now, don't get us wrong.  The way we see it, the manufacturers make those cleaning products that way to smell nice - you may not like the notion of wearing eau de toilet-cleaner or window-polish on your body, but you have to concede that those things have a core smell of freshness and cleanliness.  We think this is what you get with Chanel Allure Homme Sport Eau Extreme -  but in a much more appetizing package.

And when you allow the scent to calm down a bit, and you get something akin to taking a bite out of a sweet creamcake.

While there will always be that undercurrent of furniture polish, or perhaps the reek of a recently unboxed IKEA flatpack, we feel that, given time, eventually the sugary vanilla starts to intertwine with the pine smell and produces an enchanting combination - something slightly Christmassy, if we're honest, like a scented candle.

If we can believe Chanel themselves, Allure Homme Sport Eau Extreme is: 'The sporty, sensual scent, in a new concentrated Eau de Toilette, is heightened with notes of Moroccan Cypress and Venezuelan Tonka Bean'.  We're getting the wood and the vanilla (from the tonka bean) notes there, for sure.  But others have detected mandarin (that might be what we mean when we talk about it being Christmassy), mint and pepper.  We're not so sure our noses picked up those last two.

Promotional video

So much for the fantastic smell of this EDT.  For us, it's actually the marketing of it that is a bit of a contradiction.

Check out the video here with surfer Danny Fuller.  'Homme Sport Eau extreme'.  

OK, so let's see: it's an EDT, hence: 'eau'; Danny is performing some pretty cool moves, so you're meant to think of his surfing in terms of 'extreme sport'; and he's doing it all on water, or 'eau'... so ok, 'eau extreme', we geddit, we geddit...

The confusion for us is, it's Chanel Allure.  I'm sure plenty of girls fancy Danny, so of course he's alluring in that sense. But otherwise the advert has nothing to do with alluring anyone.

After all, he appears to be all alone on that stretch of beach; and when he's busy surfing, nobody can talk to him, and he can't chat up the girls either.  At one point Danny appears to be praying briefly, in communion with no other living being that we can see; and even his tattoo - his own surname - simply refers right back to its owner, instead of sending a message to the outside world.  All very solipsistic (that's a big word for us).

So it's odd that this one is 'Allure', since whatever attraction Danny might hold for men and women, he is depicted as so self-absorbed in his own little bubble as to be out of reach.  And the Christmassy undertones, the warm woody scents of the frag, just seem utterly distant from a sun-drenched Hawaiian beach.

Anyway, just our 2 cents.  Speaking of which, the video itself cost a bit more that that, we can tell you: it is undeniably slick and very 'French cool' if you can put aside our carping about the sociable connotations of the word 'Allure'.  The one uploaded here is one of three directed by Kathryn Bigelow for Chanel Allure (and she knows a thing or two about surfing films, if you've seen Point Break) - this one is the most substantial one.  It certainly wasn't low budget, that's for sure, but then let's not forget that Chanel have recruited other titans of the big screen like Martin Scorsese to direct their advertisements before now.  

So this is it: while we wouldn't wear it to work, this EDT is a bit of winner from Chanel! Well worth a look...

Overall rating: 8.5 out of 10.

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