If you want to know what Chanel’s new No. 5 Eau Première smells like, try this: take a bottle of Chanel No. 5 Eau de Parfum and position it next to a window, preferably overlooking a hedge of roses, where the sun will cast a pinkish light through the bottle. Now cross the room and squint your eyes so that your vision of the bottle of No. 5 blurs. That is Eau Première.

That didn’t work? Try this: picture in your mind the Andy Warhol painting of a No. 5 bottle. Now imagine it repainted by Renoir. This, too, is Eau Première.

Maybe visual comparisons aren’t for you. Then I’ll quote from the “Fashion Rocks” supplement to this September’s Vogue magazine:

A perfume like Chanel No. 5 is a little like the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, an album that did not initially go gold but is considered one of the greatest albums ever made, and has sold a ton over the long run. Similarly, the reformulated Chanel No. 5 Eau Première, launched this fall for a younger market, is akin to a dance-club remix of something written pre-American Idol…

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