The Secret of Chanel No. 5 (36 page)

6
A fortune-teller had told her that it was the number of her special destiny:
“Chanel, the Couturier, Dead in Paris,”
New York Times,
January 11, 1971.

7
“I present my dress collections on the fifth of May, the fifth month of the year,” she told him, “and so … it will bring good luck”:
Beaux, “Souvenirs.”

8
A perfume, she once sermonized, “should resemble the person wearing it”:
Interview with Jacques Chazot, produced as “Dim Dam Dom.”

9
chemists Georges Darzens and E. E. Blaise … found ways to separate and synthesize a large group of fragrance molecules:
Darzens directed the perfume research laboratory at L. T. Piver from 1897–1920; see Michael Edwards,
Perfume Legends
(Levallois: H.M. Editions, 1996), 43, 83.

10
A chemist would say that the hydrogen in the ethanol, the kind of alcohol in wine, combines with the oxygen in the air:
Technically, ethanol oxidizes to acetic acid, with acetaldehyde as an intermediary stage; acetaldehyde is also the result of the fermentation process; see S. Q. Liu and G. J. Pilone, “An Overview of Formation and Roles of Acetaldehyde in Winemaking with Emphasis on Microbiological Implications,”
International Journal of Food Science and Technology
35 (2000), 49–61.

11
Aldehydes have the smell of many things:
For the best general discussion, see Luca Turin,
The Secret of Scent: Adventures in Perfume and the Science of Smell
(New York: Harper Perennial, 2006), 54.

12
The “unblemished whiteness of [these] aldehydes,” writes one fragrance expert, is the smell of “powder snow”:
Jim Drobnick, ed.,
The Smell Culture Reader
(Oxford, UK: Berg Publishers, 2006), 226, writing here about Estée Lauder's strongly aldehydic fragrance White Linen, based on the almost equally aldehydic Chanel No. 22, based on Chanel No. 5; see also Turin,
The Secret of Scent,
54, for the role of aldehydes in White Linen.

13
They are part of what gives a fine wine its heady bouquet and smooth tannins:
On the role of aldehydes in wine, see Siss Frivik and Susan Ebeler, “Influence of Sulfur Dioxide on the Formation of Aldehydes in White Wine,”
American Journal of Viticulture and Enology
54, no. 1 (2003): 31–38; Laura Culleré, Jaun Cacho, and Vincente Ferreira, “Analysis for Wine C5-C8 Aldehydes through the Determination of Their O-(2,3,4,5,6-pentafluorobenzyl)oximes Formed Directly in the Solid Phrase Extraction Cartridge,”
Analytica Chimica Acta
523, no. 1–2 (2004): 201–206.

14
One of the earliest aldehydes discovered, cinnamaldehyde:
For details on aldehydes, my thanks to Ron Winnegrad and Subha Patel at International Flavors and Fragrances and to conservator Elizabeth Morse.

15
adding aldehydes to the rich scents of florals is very much like what happens when a cook drizzles fresh lemon over strawberries:
Jacques Polge, Chanel, interview, 2009.

16
Chemists will also argue that aldehydes have the effect of stimulating what is known as the trigeminal nerve:
Luca Turin, interview, 2009; see also Ron S. Jackson,
Wine Tasting: A Professional Handbook
(San Diego: Elsevier Academic Press, 2002), 52; E. Joy Bowles,
The Chemistry of Aromatherapeutic Oils
(Crows Nest, Australia: Allen & Unwin Academic, 2004), 148; Hirokazu Tsubone and Meiji Kawata, “Stimulation to the Trigeminal Afferent Nerve of the Nose by Formaldehyde, Acrolein, and Acetaldehyde Gases,”
Inhalation Toxicology
3, no. 2 (1991): 211–22.

17
“most aromatic compounds can [also] stimulate trigeminal nerve fibers”:
Jackson,
Wine Tasting,
52.

18
There at the northern reaches of the world, stationed along the Polar Circle:
See K. Sieg, E. Starokozhev, E. Fries, S. Sala, and W. Püttmann, “N-Aldehydes (C6-C10) in Snow Samples Collected at the High Alpine Research Station Jungfraujoch during CLACE 5,”
Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics,
vol. 9 (2009), 8071–99, www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/9/8071/2009; and “Atmospheric Chemicals Seen in a New Light,”
CNN,
March 23, 1999.

19
“I finally captured it, but not without effort, because the first aldehydes that I was able to find were unstable and unreliably manufactured”:
Beaux, “Souvenirs.”

20
Constantin Weriguine, later remembered: a “winter melting note”:
Constantin Weriguine,
Souvenirs et Parfums: Mémoires d'un Parfumeur
(Paris: Plon, 1965); Weriguine notes that Ernest Beaux was working with the memory of what the Russians call
chernozem
(“black soil”), a humus-rich soil scent, to capture the idea of melting snow in the spring, 162.

21
He warned Coco Chanel that a perfume with this much jasmine would be fabulously expensive:
According to Pierre Galante,
Les années Chanel,
85, Ernest Beaux told her, “There are in this bottle more than twenty ingredients. This perfume will be expensive.” She asked, “Ah, what is it that's so expensive in there?” “The jasmine,” he told her. “Nothing is more expensive than jasmine.” To which she replied, “Ah, good! Use more. I want to make the most expensive perfume in the world.”

22
“was the first fragrance to make use of synthetically replicated molecules taken from products of natural origin called aldehydes”:
Susannah Frankel, “The Chanel No. 5 Story,”
The Independent,
October 15, 2008, www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/the-chanel-no-5-story-961226.html; Nigel Groom,
The New Perfume Handbook
(London: Chapman and Hall, 1997), 61, also calls it “The first of the aldehyde perfumes.” Kate Shapland, “Chanel No. 5: Enduring Love,”
The Telegraph,
May 7, 2009, www.telegraph.co.uk/fashion/labels/chanel/5285472/Chanel-No-5-enduring-love.html, credits it with being “the world of scent's first abstract olfactory creation.” None of these statements is entirely correct.

23
Even Robert Bienaimé's groundbreaking scent Quelques Fleurs–which used one of the so-called C-12 aldehydes:
See Kraft, Ledard, and Goutell, “From
Rallet No. 1
to
Chanel No.
5.”

24
Pierre Armingeat and Georges Darzens's Reve d'Or (1905) and Floramye (1905) claim the honors:
Bernard Chant, “The Challenge of Creativity,”
Newsletter of the British Society of Perfumers,
1983, www.bsp.org.uk/newsarc/creat.html; see also the excellent discussion by perfume historian and blogger Elena Vosnaki, “Myth Debunking 1: What Are Aldehydes, How Do Aldehydes Smell and Chanel No. 5,”
Perfume Shrine,
December 2, 2008, http://perfumeshrine.blogspot.com/2008/12/myth-debunking-1-what-are-aldehydes-how.html. Some sources date Floramye to as early as 1895 or 1903, but the evidence is not conclusive. The sources claiming that Reve d'Or dates to 1925 have likely confused the original launch of the perfume with its relaunch in 1925. See Christie Mayer Lefkowith,
The Art of Perfume
(New York: Thames and Hudson, 1994).

25
“it is the aldehyde note that, since the creation of Chanel No. 5, has more than anything else influenced new perfume compositions”:
Beaux, “Souvenirs.”

26
“When did I invent it? In 1920 precisely. After my return from the war”:
Ibid.

27
As Edmonde Charles-Roux, tells it: “the development of No. 5 … proceeded in a rather heavy atmosphere …”:
Charles-Roux,
Chanel,
202.

28
named not after the number of the fragrance vial but after the number of “a station in Coty's laboratory at either Suresnes or at the Rallet factory in the south of France”:
Toledano and Coty,
François Coty,
86.

29
François Coty's massive perfume company had swallowed up yet another of his smaller competitors:
Kraft, Ledard, and Goutell, “From
Rallet No. 1
to
Chanel No.
5,” 39; see also Toledano and Coty,
François Coty,
56.

30
They were based on a previous formula:
See Kraft, Ledard, and Goutell, “From Rallet No. 1 to Chanel No. 5"; on the basis of GCMS analysis of samples and archival research, the authors demonstrate the relationship among Le Bouquet de Catherine / Rallet No. 1, Chanel No. 5, Mademoiselle Chanel No. 1, and other fragrances, including Quelques Fleurs.

31
adding to the blend, for example, his own rose-scent invention, “Rose E.B.,” and the mixed notes of a jasmine field:
Private correspondence, Philip Kraft, 2009; see also the excellent entry on Chanel No. 5 at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chanel_No._5, and the (purported) early Chanel No. 5 cologne formulae available online at http://asylum.zensoaps.com/index.php?showtopic=6800.

1
wondered aloud, “What was that fragrance?” “The effect,” she later said, “was amazing”:
Galante,
Les années Chanel,
85; the version is somewhat different in Madsen,
Chanel,
134.

2
we have perfumed ourselves with a remarkably small and consistent number of fragrances, perhaps only a hundred:
See Milinski and Wedekind, “Evidence for MHC-Correlated Perfume Preferences,” 147; the authors estimate 100,000 scents in the world and claim that even the most average untrained human nose can recognize upward of ten thousand.

3
“we are as strongly attracted to roses and violets as any bee”:
Watson,
Jacobson's Organ,
158.

4
“In the lily of the valley they sell on the 1st of May, I can smell the hands of the kid who picked it”:
Baillén,
Chanel Solitaire,
86; Galante,
Mademoiselle Chanel,
67.

5
“share the same peculiar chemical architecture, carrying ten atoms of carbon and sixteen atoms of hydrogen in every molecule”:
Watson,
Jacobson's Organ,
165.

6
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”:
Watson,
Jacobson's Organ,
165.

7
Flowers are, after all, the essential machinery of a plant's reproductive organs, and perfumes are often made from their sexual secretions:
Watson,
Jacobson's Organ,
157. On the difference between storax and styrax, below, see
The New Perfume Handbook.

8
“many classical ingredients of natural origins [in perfume-making are] reminiscent of human body odors”:
Milinski and Wedekind, “Evidence for MHC-Correlated Perfume Preferences,” 148. This works, of course, at the level of minute sub-scents. The scent of a jasmine flower, for example, is made up of hundreds of different molecules, and the smell of a rose is made up of as many as a thousand. Of those thousand molecules, only a handful give the plant the aroma we recognize as a
rose
smell. All those other hundreds of molecules give a particular rose blossom the qualities that make it unique, and they create a set of sub-scents that operate, more often than not, somewhere below the threshold of our conscious recognition of them. As Milinski and Wedekind put it, while “the scents of … rose and jasmine apparently differ. … a natural flower oil may contain over 400 different odorants … [and] many classical ingredients of natural origins [are] reminiscent of human body odors. … It may be because of their subscents that specific species have a long tradition of being used for perfumes,” 148; see also discussions in Chandler Burr,
The Emperor of Scent: A Story of Perfume, Obsession, and the Last Mystery of the Senses
(New York: Random House, 2003), 130; and Rachel Herz,
The Scent of Desire: Discovering Our Enigmatic Sense of Smell
(New York: William Morrow, 2007), 18.

9
poet John Donne wrote about the “sweet sweat of roses”:
John Donne, “The Comparison” (elegy 8, line 1), in
John Donne, The Complete English Poems,
ed. A. J. Smith (New York: Penguin, 1971).

10
indoles are the smell of something sweet and fleshy and just a little bit dirty:
See Drobnick,
The Smell Culture Reader,
214; jasmine, orange blossom, honeysuckle, tuberose, and ylang-ylang are flowers that, chemically speaking, have particularly high proportions of indoles. Other organic compounds with these same materials and sub-notes include sweat, feces, and rotting bodies.

11
“several ingredients of incenses resembl[e] scents of the human body”:
Lyall Watson writes, “the most interesting feature of incense … is that it comes from five principal sources: myrrh, frankincense, laudanum [i.e., labdanum], galbanus and styrax [or storax] … [and all] contain resin alcohols, called phytosterols, which biochemically are remarkably similar to human hormones,” especially those found in our saliva, sweat, and urine,
Jacobson's Organ,
152; see also “To Attract a Woman by Wearing Scent, a Man Must First Attract Himself,”
The Economist,
December 8, 2008, 136.

12
When the perfumer Paul Jellinek was writing what is still the standard textbook on the science of fragrance chemistry:
Paul Jellinek and Robert R. Calkin,
Perfumery: Practice and Principles
(Oxford: Wiley Interscience, 1993); cited in Watson,
Jacobson's Organ,
153.

13
When Coty was trying to convince a certain Henri de Villemessant, the man in charge of Paris's chic department store Les Grands Magasins:
Toledano and Coty,
François Coty,
64.