In 1921, a clever French businesswoman and belle of the Parisian social elite created a scent that revolutionized the way women smell. Ninety years later, Chanel No 5 is arguably still the world’s most iconic perfume.
With a healthy disregard for social etiquette and a retinue of friends and admirers among the city's "racy" women, couturier Gabrielle (Coco) Chanel traversed the boundaries between lady and mistress.
By the beginning of the 1920s, Chanel was already a phenomenon in French fashion circles.
She had come to Paris as the mistress of the textile baron Étienne Balsan in 1909 and set up a millinery boutique under Balsan's apartment.
By 1921, she had a series of successful boutiques in Paris, Deauville, and Biarritz; she owned a villa in the south of France and drove around in her own blue Rolls-Royce.
Now, she wanted to create a scent that could embody the new, modern woman she epitomized.
Chanel's background was troubled and complex, and this complexity seeped into her trademark fragrance.
She was the daughter of a market-stall holder and a laundry woman in rural France. When her mother died, she was sent to a Cistercian convent at Aubazine, where she spent her teenage years.
Cleanliness
The smell of soap and freshly scrubbed skin was something that stuck with her for years.
She was fastidiously clean and, later, when she worked among the mistresses of the rich, she complained about their musk and body odor.
When she decided to commission a perfume for her best clients—a new trend among fashion houses—it was important that it imbue this freshness. However, she had trouble finding a perfumer who could achieve this.
"The holy grail in perfumery has always been to create very fresh fragrances that last," says Frédéric Malle, perfume editor and professional "nose".
"In those days, the only way to create fresh fragrances was to use citrus such as lemon, bergamot, and orange. These are very fresh and charming but don’t last on the skin."
At the time, chemists had already isolated chemicals called aldehydes, which could artificially create these smells.
But they were extraordinarily powerful, so perfumers were hesitant to use them.
During the late summer of 1920, Chanel went on holiday on the Côte d'Azur with her lover, Grand Duke Dimitri Pavlovich.
There, she learned of a perfumer, a sophisticated and well-read character named Ernest Beaux, who had worked for the Russian royal family and lived nearby in Grasse, the center of the perfume industry.
Beaux was a curious and daring craftsman and took up Chanel’s challenge.
Result of a Mistake?
It took him several months to perfect a new fragrance, but eventually, he came up with 10 samples and presented them to Chanel. They were numbered one to five and 20 to 24. She picked number five.
It is rumored that the concoction was actually the result of a laboratory mistake. Beaux’s assistant had added a dose of aldehyde in a quantity never used before.
Tilar Mazzeo, author of The Secret of Chanel No 5, explained on the World Service’s Witness program why the fragrance captivated Chanel. "The interesting thing about aldehydes is that one of them smells like soap. So she could balance in her own mind her childhood in a convent with this luxurious life as a mistress."
Chanel later said, "It was what I was waiting for. A perfume like nothing else. A woman's perfume, with the scent of a woman."
The scent, imbued with jasmine, rose, sandalwood, and vanilla, was an instant success, partly due to some of Coco's ingenious marketing tricks. She invited Beaux and friends to a popular upmarket restaurant on the Riviera to celebrate and decided to spray the perfume around the table. Each woman who passed stopped and asked what the fragrance was and where it came from.
"For Chanel, this was the moment that confirmed it was going to be a revolutionary perfume," says Mazzeo.
"That was the first moment that anybody in the public smelled Chanel No 5, and it literally stopped them in their tracks. That moment, consumers were smelling something they had never smelled before; it was an intervention in the history of perfume."
The story of the creation of Chanel No 5 is truly fascinating. It was the first perfume to use synthetic aldehydes in its formula and started a trend toward synthetics that has never stopped. Chanel No 5 is still a wonderful perfume today, but I wonder how much it resembles the 1921 version.
Changes in the provenance of the ingredients due to cost and availability must have caused some differences. Still, Chanel No 5 is high on my favourites list.
Here at NeoScent International . We can compose a scent that is unlike any other and will be yours forever. Reach out to us at +66 2559 2330 or visit us at www.neoscent.com.