Concept campaign, self-initiated. Not a client · Beauty

Bleu de Chanel

A self-initiated fragrance campaign reinterpreting a heritage luxury brand through a cinematic, intimate lens.

For Bleu de Chanel, I wanted to show my own reading of a well-known brand while staying within its established visual language. The campaign focuses on nocturnal mood, understated luxury and magnetic masculinity, using midnight-blue tones, strong contrast and tactile glass reflections. The creative idea centred on the ritual of fragrance application, moving from the physical mist on skin to a more cinematic portrait of quiet confidence. The biggest challenge was keeping the dark glass bottle realistic, especially its light refraction, reflections and small typography, while maintaining a premium, believable finish throughout the set.

Services
  • Creative direction
  • Brand interpretation
  • AI image production
What I made
  • Fragrance campaign concept
  • Product + portrait imagery
  • Luxury storytelling frames
  • Multi-asset visual world

The brief

This is a self-initiated study in luxury perfume photography, built around Bleu de Chanel Eau de Parfum and made entirely with AI. Chanel had no part in it.

The question I set myself was whether I could give a fragrance this well known a reading of my own without losing what makes it Chanel. A heritage house already has a visual language. The job is to bring a point of view to it and to know which parts are not mine to change, starting with the bottle. I chose Bleu de Chanel because its strong visual identity gave me a clear starting point. I wanted to explore a more intimate, tactile interpretation, using light, texture and atmosphere to bring my own perspective while keeping the fragrance recognisable.

Bleu also brings out the two problems that, to my mind, make fragrance the hardest brief in beauty. You cannot show a smell, so the image has to show its consequence. And the bottle is a mirror, in this case one made of dark blue glass, inside a set that is darker still.

The direction

Most of the set is perfume photography with a model, and I kept one man throughout. He and the bottle share the same midnight blue, lit hard from the side, so his skin and the glass each catch their own edge of light.

The order follows the ritual of wearing it. The set opens on the Chanel name spelled in droplets across his torso, then the bottle raised beside his face, half in shadow, then the spray at his neck with the mist caught in the light. After that the bottle stands alone on a wet floor in blue haze. The last two frames leave the product behind for a turn in a long navy coat and a walk down a wet street at night.

In the terms I use for fragrance, the set leans on gesture and atmosphere. The hand and the neck put scale on the bottle, and cold light and mist read as sharp and clean. The bottle stays precise. Everything around it becomes atmosphere.

What was hard

Dark blue glass in a dark set wants to disappear, so the bottle was the hard part. Glass only reads as glass when something reflects in it. In the still life, the bottle is held apart from the dark by a thin line of light along each edge, the droplets on its cap and its reflection in the wet floor. Without those it reads as dead plastic.

The spray shot took the most rounds. The challenge was making the mist look natural within the frame while keeping the bottle's text accurate and the model's identity consistent across revisions. At the end I graded the blues by hand so the six frames sit together as one set.