You wouldn’t stroll into Mario Batali’s kitchen and overthrow his carbonara recipe. Or walk through Christian Louboutin’s studio and suggest tweaking the color of the soles. And it would certainly take guts to take on the world’s oldest and most beloved fragrance, Chanel No. 5. But if there's one person poised to do it, it’s perfumer Olivier Polge. His take on the scent, launching in the form of Chanel No. 5 L’Eau this fall, is the freshest, cleanest, and — in my opinion — sexiest interpretation of it yet.But to understand the new scent, you need to understand a little about Polge first. The 40-year-old is a bit of a prodigal son in the world of perfumery. He was born into fragrance royalty (his father, Jacques Polge, was Chanel’s master perfumer since 1978; before that, it was Henri Robert who succeeded the original perfumer, Ernest Beaux, who created Chanel No. 5). But Polge rejected the call for a while — pursuing architecture, classical piano, and graphic design before slowly making his way back to fragrance and producing edgy hits like Flowerbomb and Florabotanica in the early 2000s. Finally, in 2013 he took over his father’s post at the house of Chanel. With it, he brought a completely new outlook — reinventing classic scents and breaking longstanding traditions. (His other major project, Chanel Boy, launching this summer, is the house’s first unisex fragrance .)