Allure Homme Sport is the scent of the sea smelled days later on a towel. This towel has been used multiple times and has been used to wipe off sweat, a saline body after a dip in the ocean, and then finally used to towel dry hair washed with citric shampoos. Allure Homme Sport is at once aquatic and ozonic, and is brisk and somewhat self-evolving with an arid, dispersive, and a surprisingly thick and rich freshness.

© 2014 Liam Sardea

The opening of this fragrance for me is rather damp, with a white noise opening of messy top notes. Watermelon ketones, or calone, reeks of the too often explored oceanic category. This note is somewhat macerated , combined with orangey and aldehydic notes much like the static blur on an analogue television, trailed with a faint musk and tonka accord.

Patience is rewarded despite this opening. Many talk about a creaming soda accord – and in truth what this really is is the calone muddled with ripe fruit, tinted with a hesperidic edge, and then finally combined with a slightly sour-green, and unfortunately synthetic backbone. This imitates fizz, whilst sweetness from the orange note imitates soda.

Whilst this is labelled as a sport scent, it is indeed too heavy to be used and applied during sporting instances. Sweat promotes projection, and to smell somewhat creamy is not something appropriate in this context.

Predictable is this fragrance, whilst also verging on unimaginative for Chanel. Nevertheless, in a wider and more global context, this fragrance fairs very well. It is a top seller because it is, put simply, safe and deceptive. Some individuals can pull apart screechy top notes however common folk generally can’t do so.  Popularly described as ‘pleasant but studiedly nondescript’, this is like Cool Water seen through a rainbow filter with a confectionary based connotation – like summer fruit bobbing in water, sprinkled with something a tad bit sour – old and tepid water perhaps.

The difficult encounters fade away quickly (thankfully) and are pushed far, far away into the deep background. A tenacious freshness is given, as the fragrance begins to breathe out new facets. A sweet and sour accord appears, balancing cedar wood with the aforementioned tang of citric soda – almost reaching a  ‘chypre’ status. This forms the heart of the fragrance, with a concerning  linear feature.

On a figurative level, Allure Homme Sport reminds me of a poorly made rocket ship often seen in film. It launches into space and breaches the atmosphere, but very slowly the cliche occurs – the outer starts to shed off, and the layers of the ship continue to fall off until we are left with one sole, yet functional, piece of the ship left. This Chanel ship’s most outer layer is metallic silver in colour like the bottle. And when that sheds, what is revealed is a trio of colours – we have swirls of seemingly random greens and oranges and purples all set out  covering this new layer. This layer only appears after the opening has dissipated, and it is pleasant. The ‘notes’ meld together nicely and they coexist. Unfortunately this poor little brave ship is doomed, and whilst the colours are beautiful and everything mingles nicely, the orange panels of the ship begin to crumble, and then slowly the greens fly off into abandon, and finally the purples melt into nothing.

What occurs in Allure Homme Sport is that the spices begin to disappear, and then the citrus twang is lost, and finally we are left with a meek structure only capable of supporting  simple and drab notes – including the sharp cedar wood, and a rather cold steely amber. A fellow reviewer calls it a ‘bath product musk’.

Alternatives: Versace Pour Homme by Versace; L’Eau D’Issey Pour Homme Intense by Issey Miyake; Millésime Impérial by Creed; and Batucada by L’Artisan Parfumeur.

Despite my critical views, considering the climate for this region of the market, Allure Homme Sport does a mighty fine job in light of its competitors in the aromatic department; this one takes at least a silver or a very very close gold (for what it’s worth).

Subjective rating: 2/5

Objective rating: 2/5