The Secret of Chanel No. 5 (11 page)

What better way to introduce all these trendsetters to her perfume, Coco wondered, than to celebrate the invention of her signature fragrance at an exclusive restaurant in Cannes? She asked Ernest to join the party. She knew that, at the height of the season in this fashionable resort, some of the world's most stylish women were bound to pass right by her table. After all, the couturière Coco Chanel was already famous.

Coco Chanel desperately wanted to know whether everyone else would agree that the scent was as fabulous as she suspected, so she couldn't resist a private little showcasing of it that evening. There at her table, she stealthily perfumed the air with samples, and–as the world got its first intoxicating whiff of Chanel No. 5 that evening on the French Riviera–the result delighted her. Those lucky diners stopped dead in their tracks and wondered aloud, “What was that fragrance?” “The effect,” she later said, “was amazing
¹
, all the women who passed by our table stopped and sniffed the air. We pretended we didn't notice.” Just as Coco had predicted, it was unlike anything they had ever before experienced. It was spectacular, and, above all, it was very sexy.

W
hat was it, precisely, that had these influential friends–the men and women who became the first to experience what would become the world's most famous perfume–so enthralled? Part of the answer, of course, is that Ernest's bouquet of aldehydes was quite literally unlike anything almost anyone had ever experienced. Only those in the most innovative laboratories of the 1920s had any idea how the smell of aldehydes would soon change the fragrance industry.

But aldehydes are just a part of what makes Chanel No. 5 special, despite the importance given to them in the legend. Long after they have faded–because aldehydes fade quickly–there is a rich depth of musks and florals in the perfume that is strikingly sensual. That was true, too, in the summer of 1920.

Musks and white flowers, especially, were the fragrance of something racy and a bit illicit in the 1920s. The idea that this was an erotic perfume didn't come down to cultural association alone, though. The sensual allure of some perfumes is far less a matter of personal preference than we might imagine. Those who passed Coco Chanel's table that evening were responding to something elemental. As those women who voted Chanel No. 5 the “world's most seductive perfume” in 2009 knew intuitively, some fragrances
are
simply more alluring than others. There are good reasons why scents like jasmine and tuberose, incenses like patchouli and sandalwood, and the powerful aromas of musks have been considered erotic for centuries, reasons why some fragrances have been called powerful aphrodisiacs.

Think of all the possible smells in the world. There are more than a hundred thousand. Even an average, untrained person can recognize upward of ten thousand. Then consider this basic fact: for several millennia, we have perfumed ourselves with a remarkably small and consistent number of scents, perhaps only a hundred
²
. We are fascinated by a minute fraction of the vast olfactory extravaganza with which nature has presented us, and “we are as strongly attracted to roses and violets as any bee
³
.” When we begin investigating the chemical structures of the odors that have enticed us in the long history of perfume-making, it turns out that there are some clear connections between scent and the intimate smell of bodies.

Coco Chanel certainly understood–and felt–this relationship. Smell was always the keenest of her senses, and, to explain the intensity of how she lived with scent, she would claim, “In the lily of the valley they sell on the 1st of May, I can smell the hands of the kid who picked it
⁴
.” Or maybe she picked up on the notes of warm skin in the scents of flowers because her nose was exceptional. According to scientists, there is a simple reason why humans are so powerfully attracted to the scents of certain flowers: whether we know it or not, blossoms smell like bodies. And the bodies of others are enticing. When Coco Chanel caught hints of flesh in her flowers, there was nothing fanciful about her perception. There was nothing fanciful about the idea of Chanel No. 5 having the scent of a woman, either.

The idea that flowers smell like bodies, of course, seems like a strange proposition. But scent is an amazing thing, and the science is unequivocal. Take a close look at the hundred-odd ingredients that have formed the heart of traditional perfumery since the time of Aphrodite's first international bestseller, and the connection between scent and sex and skin is always there as soon as we look beyond the surface. From the chemist's perspective, many of the smells that humans like have something striking in common: they “share the same peculiar chemical architecture, carrying ten atoms of carbon and sixteen atoms of hydrogen in every molecule
⁵
.” Put more simply, it means that the smells that attract us fall into clearly delimited categories.

The fragrances that we have used to adorn ourselves for millennia tend to be divisible into four clear subgroups of compounds–alcohols, esters, ketones, and, famously for Chanel No. 5, aldehydes. They are aromatic molecules with shared elements in their structures. As Lyall Watson writes in her book
Jacobson's Organ,
however, “it does these magical fragrances no favour to reduce them to esthers and aldehydes.”
⁶
What matters is that they attract us, and they attract others.

When experts talk about the structure of a perfume, they speak of its apprehension in time, and they sometimes use the metaphor of the body–of head notes and heart notes and of what is euphemistically known as the bottom notes, or sometimes just the dry-down. The head notes are the most fleeting of all the aromatics, and they characterize the experience of a perfume during the first half-hour of its application. These are often the aromas of the most delicate floral and citrus fragrances. The heart notes are those scents that endure a little longer, during the next several hours, typically the stronger florals and hardy, sensual plant resins. The scents that linger longest–those at the bottom–almost always include a perfume's musks, which come, appropriately enough, from nether places. They have long been recognized as some of nature's most powerful fixatives.

Generally speaking, there are three kinds of materials that are used to make perfume–scents inspired by flowers; scents inspired by other parts of plants, such as their roots, barks, and resins; and scents inspired by the smells of animals. Chanel No. 5–one of history's most famously sexy perfumes–uses them all in generous doses. But Chanel No. 5 is especially about the florals–the ingredients of traditional perfumery that might seem to have the least in common with the smell of the body. Yet, reconsider. Flowers are, after all, the essential machinery of a plant's reproductive organs, and perfumes are often made from their sexual secretions
⁷
. The difference between plant estrogens and animal estrogens is a slight one.

Roses and jasmine may not seem likely to smell like sweat and bodies, but to think otherwise would be wrong. As scientists who study the sexiness of perfumes explain, “many classical ingredients of natural origins [in perfume-making are] reminiscent of human body odors.”
⁸
It hasn't taken modern science to realize that, either. As early as the seventeenth century, the poet John Donne wrote about the “sweet sweat of roses
⁹
.” Among the most inherently sensual have always been the scents of jasmine, orange blossom, honeysuckle, tuberose, and ylang-ylang, flowers that, chemically speaking, have particularly high proportions of the scent molecule known as an indole. Those indoles are the smell of something sweet and fleshy and just a little bit dirty
¹⁰
.

The same is true of those delicious plant resins: “several ingredients of incenses resembl[e] scents of the human body,”
¹¹
one expert reminds us. When the perfumer Paul Jellinek was writing what is still the standard textbook on the science of fragrance chemistry
¹²
, his testing on traditional incenses showed that myrrh and frankincense had identifiable notes of armpit odor; a common plant source known as storax was the scent of skin; and the coveted resinous gum known as labdanum had “the smell of head hair.” When any of them were added to a simple, fruity
eau de cologne,
people consistently rated the perfume as more sexy. With its fragrant central notes of labdanum and storax, Aphrodite's perfume was an erotic bestseller for a reason.

The perfume materials that have the most direct connection to the smell of sex, however, are the traditional musks. Smelled on their own, the scent is often overpowering and even revolting. Yet used in small proportions and blended with other fragrances, these materials, with their strange and unsavory origins, have been among the most prized ingredients in perfume history. They come primarily from the private parts of some very unlucky fellow creatures, whose glands and sexual excretions have been harvested.

Natural musk–musk proper–comes from the male musk deer, an animal native to China and Southeast Asia, and the fluid stored in a small sac in his nether regions during the rutting season has been the object of a lucrative international trade for centuries. The word
musk
comes from the Sanskrit word
muşka,
which translates simply as
testicle.

Also classified in the scent family of musks is civet, which has an aroma that is unmistakably fecal and comes, not surprisingly, from the anal glands of wild cats. Castoreum, another common material, comes from the scent glands used by beavers to mark their territory. Because these ingredients–or the synthetic replicas of them that are used almost exclusively today–are capable of letting a perfume linger, they are used in nearly all fragrances, ancient and modern. That they smell like sex goes without saying.

If there are a hundred sexy scents in the history of perfume–aromas that appeal to us culturally and biologically–Chanel No. 5 uses many of them. This is, in fact, the structural principle of its composition: the bright freshness of aldehydes and the smells of skin and sweat, all of which means that there
is
something inherently sensual about Chanel No. 5. There was a reason why the smell of it evoked for Coco Chanel memories of clean sheets and warm bodies.

No wonder those diners passing by the table of Coco Chanel one evening at the beginning of a decadent era stopped dead in their tracks. They had just experienced something so alluring that, almost a century later, it remains mysterious and sensual and still modern. It was the aroma of confident sexuality, and within just a few short years it would be known around the world.

C
hanel No. 5 became a sensation in fashionable circles in just a matter of a few short months, and it was this night in a restaurant in Cannes that started its dizzying rise to fame. But using stealth tactics to introduce the perfume was an idea that Coco Chanel had borrowed. For years, she had been watching as some of the great businessmen of the era made spectacular fortunes in the perfume industry, and she had been taking note of how they managed it.

Coco Chanel got the idea for this guerrilla launch of Chanel No. 5 from a famous stunt that had set her old acquaintance François Coty on the road to his astonishing riches. When Coty was trying to convince a certain Henri de Villemessant, the man in charge of Paris's chic department store Les Grands Magasins
¹³
, to sell his La Rose Jacqueminot on its shelves in the early 1900s, he made certain that the reluctant manager sampled his fragrance by clumsily breaking a bottle on the floor of the busy showroom. The customers were enchanted and began demanding bottles of the fragrance, and Coty had his first distributor. Coco Chanel was simply taking a page from the book of the world's most successful perfume magnate–a man who was because of it already among the world's richest people.

The enthusiastic response to Chanel No. 5 that night in the restaurant also convinced her that her intuition was right about the other idea she had for marketing it that autumn. Ernest Beaux had agreed to make her one hundred bottles. Having established No. 5's appeal, she returned to the idea of giving these samples of the scent to her most loyal clients as holiday gifts
¹⁴
. It was generous–but not completely unmotivated. Rather, it was a clever move intended to ignite a whisper campaign and to test the market. Coco Chanel knew well that no one would mistake the exclusivity of her fragrance, not even the elite social trendsetters. She understood instinctively the powerful equation between envy and the height of luxury.

When these women of fashion came to her boutique and asked for more of that wonderful scent, she told them coyly that it had never occurred to her it was a fragrance that she might sell and hinted that it was just a little souvenir that she had discovered at some out-of-the-way perfumery in Grasse. She claimed that she couldn't remember even where she had found it and, feigning surprise at the eager response, fueled the fires of their interest by pretending to solicit advice: did they really think she should try to get some more? Perhaps it was possible.

All the while, she was creating buzz for its launch–and writing to Ernest, entreating him to increase the pace of production. She planned to sell it the following spring from her boutiques in Paris, Deauville, and Biarritz, as part of her collection. The legend that she officially released it on May 5, 1921, the fifth day of the fifth month, in homage to her magic number is, however, unfounded. In fact, Chanel No. 5 appeared quietly on the shelves of her boutiques in 1921, where it sold immediately–and fabulously–without any advertising. Advertising would not be part of the secret of its success for many decades to come.