but complementary – series, different ‘takes’ on a new fragrance. Each of these small glass vials contained a new fragrance innovation, based on the core scents of May rose, jasmine, and those daring new fragrance molecules known as aldehydes. According to the legend, in one of the vials a careless laboratory assistant had accidentally added a massive overdose of this last and still largely undiscovered ingredient, confusing a 10 percent dilution for the pure, full-strength material.
In the room that day, surrounded by rows of perfumer’s scales, beakers, and pharmaceutical bottles, Coco Chanel sniffed and considered. She slowly drew each sample beneath her nose, and in the room there was the quiet sound of her slow inhalation and exhalation. Her face revealed nothing. It was something everyone who knew her always remembered, how impassive she could seem. In one of those perfumes, something in the catalog of her senses resonated, because she smiled and said, at last, with no indecision: ‘number five.’ ‘Yes,’ she said later, ‘that was what I was waiting for. A perfume like nothing else. A woman’s perfume, with the scent of a woman.’2
When it came to the name, too – No. 5 – she seemed self-assured and free of doubt. ‘“I present my dress collections on the fifth of May, the fifth month of the year”, she told him, “and so we will let this sample number five keep the name it has already, it will bring good luck”.’3
Many years later, in a speech given on 27 February 1946, Ernest Beaux recounted his own experience of the moment in which the legendary perfume was born:
People ask me how I managed to create Chanel No. 5. Firstly, I created this perfume in 1920, when I returned from the war. I spent part of my military deployment in the northern countries of Europe, beyond the Arctic Circle, under the midnight sun, when the lakes and rivers exude a particular freshness. I always remembered this characteristic smell, and after great struggle and effort, I managed to recreate it, although the first aldehydes were unstable. Secondly, why this name? Mademoiselle Chanel, who had a very successful fashion house, asked me to create a perfume for her. I showed her a series with the numbers 1 to 5 and 20 to 24. She chose a few, including number 5. ‘What should this perfume be called?’ I asked her. Mademoiselle Chanel replied: ‘I present the dress collection on the fifth day of the fifth month, meaning in May. So leave the perfume with the number it already has. This number 5 will bring it success.’ I must admit, she was not wrong. This new fragrance has been hugely successful; few perfumes have had so many imitators, few perfumes have been copied as persistently as Chanel No. 5.4
2 Chanel No. 5 by Ernest Beaux, 1926
No. 5 was abstract. It no longer had any association with the traditional luxurious aromas of rose, jasmine, ylang-ylang or sandalwood, but instead pointed to something new: the chemical production of fragrance and the work with aldehydes, ingredients that would ‘change the smells of an entire century’ and ‘make Chanel No. 5 perhaps the greatest perfume of the golden era’. This was not the first time aldehydes had been used, but it was the first time they had appeared in a prominent perfume and in such great quantities, creating ‘an entirely new fragrance family: the family known as the floral-aldehydic, the term for a perfume in which the scent of the aldehydes is just as important as the scent of the flowers’.5
The venerable art of perfumery, which had not yet entirely dissociated itself from its origins in alchemy and soap-making, thus collided with the chemistry of the industrial age. Aldehydes are molecules whose atoms of oxygen, hydrogen and carbon are arranged in a very particular way. They are a phase in the organic reaction known as oxidation, when alcohol is transformed into acid in the presence of oxygen. Aldehydes are said to be synthetic molecules because chemists can create them in a laboratory by isolating and stabilizing them during the oxidation process. These molecules can create a variety of smells: cinnamon, the citrus tang of orange peel, lemongrass. However, aldehydes are fleeting substances that dissipate quickly before vanishing altogether. They intensify the aromas of a perfume and trigger reactions in the nervous system, inducing a ‘tingling freshness, a little frisson of an electric sparkle. They make Chanel No. 5 feel like cool champagne bubbles bursting in the senses.’6
This is the effect Ernest Beaux had in mind when he sought to recreate the aromas he had experienced as he fled from the Russian Civil War, crossing the snowy tundra of the Kola Peninsula inside the Arctic Circle. ‘In the snows of the high alpine steppes and the blasted polar tundra, aldehydes appear today in concentrations sometimes ten times higher than in the snows of other places. The air and ice in the frozen hinterland is sharper and more fragrant than in other parts of the world.’ The stark aroma of snow and meltwater in Chanel No. 5 was balanced by an abundance of jasmine from the flower and perfume capital of Grasse, producing a sweet and exquisite fragrance with an equally exquisite price. ‘This essential contrast – between the luscious florals and the asceticism of the aldehydes – is part of the secret of Chanel No. 5 and its most famous achievement.’7
There are a number of hypotheses surrounding the creation of Chanel No. 5. The theory that it was a mixing error on the part of an assistant is countered by the fact that the chord of rose and jasmine is perfectly balanced against the aldehyde complex, meaning it was the result of systematic studies. And the theory that it was inspired by the bracing arctic air is countered by the fact that Beaux had already used aldehydes in his Bouquet de Catherine in 1913, which was influenced by the popular Quelques Fleurs fragrance from the French perfumer Robert Bienaimé (1876–1960). The most likely scenario, therefore, is that Chanel No. 5 was a (modified) remake of Le Bouquet de Catherine from 1913, which Beaux had renamed and presented as Rallet No. 1 one year later.8
Chanel No. 5 is said to be composed of thirty-one raw materials. In the elaborate language of perfume experts who want to speak in a manner befitting their subject, the list of aromas might be described (or camouflaged) as follows:
The top note is dominated by the vividly fresh, lightly metallic-waxy-smoky aldehyde complex C-10/C-11/C-12 (1:1:1.06 %), with its typical echoes of waxy rose petals and orange peel. The hesperidic-citric facets are picked up and emphasised by bergamot oil, linalool and petitgrain oil. The heart note is spanned by an aromatic core of jasmine, rose, lily-of-the-valley (hydroxycitronellal), iris butter and ylang-ylang oil.9
Molecular analysis has ‘unequivocally’ proven the lineage of Chanel No. 5, but at the same time, the formula is said to have remained a secret to this day.10
Much about the perfume is shrouded in uncertainty, including how Chanel No. 5 developed from this point onwards. This has to do with the nature of an industry that relies on secrecy, as demonstrated not least by Patrick Süskind’s novel Perfume. But its composition alone does not explain the stupendous success of Chanel No. 5. Many other things had to happen for this to be possible, as we will see. Chanel No. 5 is the product of what Karl Lagerfeld refers to as the ‘Russian connection’ in his homage to Coco Chanel, meaning it is more than just the sum of Chanel, Beaux and Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich.11 Ernest Beaux used his original Russian creation as a starting point, but he went on to develop a clearer, bolder fragrance.
It captured the scents of Moscow and Saint Petersburg and Dmitri’s gilded childhood. It was the exquisite freshness of the Arctic remembered during the last days of a fading empire. Above all, for Coco Chanel, here was an entire catalogue of the senses – the scents of crisp linen and warm skin, the odors of Aubazine and Royallieu, and all those memories of Boy and Émilienne. It was truly her signature perfume. Like her, it even had a past that was obscure and complicated.12
The perfume ‘captured precisely the spirit of the Roaring Twenties’ and ultimately ‘shifted the paradigm’ of the world of fragrance.13 There is no better expression of this paradigm shift than the design of the Chanel No. 5 bottle. The message it sends is that the era of flowers and floridity,
