Cristalle
Eau de Toilette, Chanel (1974)

I love an unapologetic 70's green chypre, the kind that smell masculine to the modern nose, but were considered feminine at the time. Cristalle EDT lives halfway between my two benchmarks of the genre, Chanel No 19 (galbanum and vetiver) and Sisley's Eau De Campagne (green tomato leaf over a citric chypre), combining elements of both.

I don't really smell any fruit except for the lemon/bergamot topnotes, and, while this smells quite "plant-y", I smell moist, cut leaves and hints of wood much more than any flowers. As such, this comes off as quite austere compared to the sunniness of Eau de Campagne, and less rich than No 19, which is thickened by its iris heart. If that makes Cristalle sound unnecessary or lacking, it isn't. Instead, to me, its topnote focus makes it fun to respray throughout the day, as one would a traditional cologne. Thumbs up!

Cristalle is viridescence.

Cool as the other side of the pillow like Prince sang. Its green hues nibble, but don't bite, the citrus is winsome but collected, and the hyacinths and honeysuckles emit their fragrance from a ways down yonder. No shoving your nose into the bloom intensity here, it's in the air, a zephyr rather than a gas. As I write this, I listen to music with plangent, reverberant guitar, and it feels fitting.

The air feels fresh, the water is placid, there are cucumber sandwiches, dewy foliage, and life feels a little bit less vertigo-inducing when viewed through Cristalle. A benevolent wood nymph is in the spirit of this one, ha! A side note, it can feel liberating to set aside cultural associations and expectations of how to process a fragrance and to just let the nose meet the mind where it is through fragrance. 

Basenoters who know more than I do think my bottle of Cristalle edt is from the late 1970s/early 1980s. I do know she's a real beaut. Lots of grassy vetiver, some sweet/sour fruit, a little wood and a generous helping of good old moss. Not too much in the way of floral action, but some. Simple and elegant, vintage Cristalle is high class all the way, baby.

Like fashion, perfumery is about selling dreams, and Chanel put just enough fantasy into Cristalle's naturalism to make it fly.

Cristalle is abstract but doesn't stray too far from garden motifs: flowers, leafy green stems, thorny woods. Its roots are in Vent Vert, No19 (of course) and to some extent the masculinity of fougères - this is not a typical feminine.
And in turn its sillage ripples out far and wide, touching works as varied as Anaïs Anaïs and Silences, both of which use the key notes of galbanum and hyacinth.

You might have thought one formal green would be enough for Chanel, but three years after her demise they released this, which is effectively a flanker of 19.
But when it's this good, who's complaining?

Get the vintage amber juice if you can.

Henri Robert's final act as second house perfumer for Chanel was to merge the green chypre genre he helped sharpen and redefine by making Chanel No. 19 (1971), with the emerging fruity floral genre that would slowly come to dominate women's perfume in the next decade. That's not to say Cristalle (1974) is all that fruity by modern standards, and is actually fairly sharp, dry, with that "pencil shavings" accord so common in feminine chypres anchored by cedar and/or pine in the base, being a sobering evolution of what fruity floral chypres like Fidji by Guy Laroche (1966) started by adding more green and aromatic tones. Jacomo Silences (1978) would push into this bitterness further, while downmarket dreamers like Avon Emprise (1976) would merge ideas present in Cristalle with heavier amounts of oakmoss and white florals, although the next logic leap wouldn't arrive until Calyx by Prescriptives (1987) showed up over a decade later. Cristalle differentiates itself further from most other green floral chypres not just by its fruity opening, but also the seriousness of its presentation, thanks to a cold finish devoid of musk or amber. Chanel No. 19 was more of a personal gift to Coco Chanel anyway, even if it was released publicly upon her death, so Cristalle would really mark the first major feminine perfume created explicitly for public consumption in the 1970's, and something of a swan song for Robert, who passed the torch to Givaudan alum and brief perfumer for YSL, Jacques Polge. Cristalle is also the only Chanel women's perfume still being sold in the iconic metal-rimmed 100ml "column bottle" that many Chanels came in during the 70's and 80's (including masculines).

Cristalle is a very fitting name for this fragrance, which uses juicy citrus and sharp galbanum to introduce hedionic florals on a crisp woods/moss base. Cristalle is a simple and elegant creation, personifying the "liberated women" aesthetic Coco started with her fashion sense before WWII and reignited in the 50's after dubious involvement with German occupiers. Bergamot, Sicilian lemon, and galbanum opens Cristalle, and it's a slightly-masculine fruity tart opening which echos the feminine perfume sentiment of the decade: a "tomboyish" mix of mossy greens with floral and/or fruit values to "femininize" them. Cristalle isn't entirely original in this presentation, with Revlon and Lauder beating Chanel to the punch, but Cristalle pairs down the aesthetic with it's minimalism of notes. Jasmine hedione and hyacinth come after the top, with a bit of rosewood to smooth it over, and this is the main feminine character of Cristalle, and enough to keep it marketed as such. Oakmoss, cedar, labdanum, and vetiver bring back to reassert the crisp masculine green edge of the opening, with the pencil shavings accord mentioned above forever pegging Cristalle as a 70's creation to the trained nose. Cristalle is a stark, lightweight construct without any warming fixatives or oriental notes, faring better in modern company than many of the heavier green chypres from the period, plus seeming generalist enough for all seasons outside deep cold, and all occasions outside maybe romantic ones or extremely formal affairs. Cristalle is very commanding in the office space due to its dry personality, so you might want to be easy on the trigger unless you're the boss.

I think the thing which damns Cristalle the most to modern noses is how emotionally "cold" it is, as if Henri Robert was trying to infuse the "happy" fruity floral chypre feeling of something like Revlon Charlie (1973) with the notoriously insensitive, feisty, and judgemental nature of Coco Chanel herself late in her life. This coldness is also what gives Cristalle some unisex potential in the 21st century, as many intentionally-unisex perfumes marry dry and serious "masculine" notes to generally upbeat fruit and floral notes seen as "feminine" in a chemical-assisted genderfluid olfactive ballet. Here in Cristalle, a man (CIS or trans) may have a bit of difficulty with the "girly" sweet jasmine/hyacinth heart of the scent, but the rest of the paint-by-numbers chypre construction of the stuff is pretty genderless. Modern women with clearly-defined feminine sensibilities will likewise find much difficulty with the sharp galbanum, vetiver, and cedar bitterness in Cristalle, but Jacques Polge came to the rescue of modern ladies twice with Cristalle Parfum (1993) and Cristalle Eau Verte (2009), which added more fruit and florals to the original framework, respectively. Cristalle is a fitting transitional fragrance for the house, marrying Coco's serious aesthetic with the more sensual one the house would develop in the coming years, and is in general a great versatile chypre that has survived the times well (although mossier vintages are better), but with a "crystalline" stoicism which keeps a bit of Coco's intimidating spirit alive posthumously. Definitely a test-first fragrance, but particularly enjoyable for fans of sharper scents that don't rely on chemical "freshness" to stay spirited. Thumbs up!

A green, luminous, fruity floral. It's nothi special, but then, it's only Chanel... a good classic.