The Secret of Chanel No. 5 (10 page)

Regarding that arctic note, Ernest remembered, “I finally captured it, but not without effort, because the first aldehydes that I was able to find were unstable and unreliably manufactured
¹⁹
.” It also made for a perfume with a kind of starkness. It was the scent of snow on cold earth, his student, perfumer Constantin Weriguine, later remembered
²⁰
: a “winter melting note.” To balance that severity in Chanel No. 5, Ernest added even greater amounts of the exquisite jasmine from the perfume capital of Grasse, opulent and honeyed enough to leave the senses swimming. He warned Coco Chanel that a perfume with this much jasmine would be fabulously expensive
²¹
. She simply told him that, in that case, he should add even more. She wanted the most extravagant perfume in the world.

Importantly, though, Coco was determined that the perfume not be completely defined by the jasmine; its scent was so heavy and languid that, alone, it was the smell of the
demi-mondaine.
Ernest also worried that the materials were literally so heavy that, without something to lift them, the scents would sink to the bottom of the bottle. In combination, these two elements of a perfume work together because the aldehydes give the effect of extraordinary lightness to these scandalously rich florals.

What this creates in Chanel No. 5 is nothing short of astonishing: the two bouquets–one natural and the other synthetic–working in an edgy balance with each other. The brighter and more expansive the aldehydes made the perfume, the more rich and luxurious the dosage of jasmine and rose could be. 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. In a simple stroke of innovation, Ernest rewrote those tired, old stories that a perfume could tell about a woman's sensuality. And that was just what Coco Chanel wanted.

Without the electric spark of whiteness, Chanel No. 5 would have been just another perfume–one of several beautiful multiflores newly created in the first decades of the twentieth century. It would have been a noteworthy departure from the generations of heavy single-note fragrances that had come before–the dozens of scents with names like Gardenia or White Rose–but it would never have become the most celebrated perfume in the world and the icon of a century. Even Coco Chanel's astonishing celebrity didn't have that kind of trendsetting power. More important, if it hadn't been both gorgeous and daring she never would have loved it–and she never would have made it her own.

Aldehydes are essential to Chanel No. 5, and Ernest used them in quantities and combinations that no one had imagined possible. They are part of what made the perfume famous. It's also easy to get carried away by the legend of their uniqueness. As recently as 2008, a journalist for a major newspaper claimed that Chanel No. 5 “was the first fragrance to make use of synthetically replicated molecules taken from products of natural origin called aldehydes
²²
.” Among the many pervasive myths that swirl around the history of the world's most famous fragrance, the one that says that Chanel No. 5 was the world's
first
perfume to use aldehydes is one of the most persistent.

This is simply the stuff of legend. Yes, Chanel No. 5 does make amazing use of aldehydes–and Ernest Beaux used them at a moment when to do so was still an innovation. Yes, because it was the first popular perfume to use them in such large proportions, it created 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.

Chanel No. 5, however, was never the first fragrance to use aldehydes. Even Robert Bienaimé's groundbreaking scent Quelques Fleurs–which used one of the so-called C-12 aldehydes
²³
to create its dazzling effects and which Ernest had carefully studied and even imitated–wasn't the earliest. Pierre Armingeant and Georges Darzens's Reve d'Or (1905) and Floramye (1905) claim the honors
²⁴
.

What has created this legend that Chanel No. 5 was the first is the wonderful synergy of a perfume launched at just the right moment and in just the right way, so that everything that came before was forgotten. The revolutionary–but not unheard of–use of aldehydes made Chanel No. 5 at the moment of its introduction a daring and unusual fragrance. Combined with the verve of Coco Chanel, it captured precisely the spirit of the Roaring Twenties. Its unimaginable commercial success also meant that, in the decades to come, no scent would be more widely copied or admired. As Ernest Beaux said years later, “it is the aldehyde note that, since the creation of Chanel No. 5, has more than anything else influenced new perfume compositions
²⁵
.” In perfume laboratories around the world, it was the aldehydes that everyone seemed to think was its secret. Soon, it became impossible to think otherwise.

C
hanel No. 5 shifted the paradigm of fragrance, and the legend that it was the world's first aldehyde scent grew out of a sense of its cultural importance. Certainly, neither Ernest Beaux nor Coco Chanel ever made claims about its use of aldehydes being original. Ernest did claim, however, that the perfume was invented in 1920, saying, “When did I invent it? In 1920 precisely. After my return from the war
²⁶
.”

Today, it is a statement capable of sharply raising eyebrows. One of the most shocking things about the legend of Chanel No. 5 is the fact that, in a fundamental sense, it wasn't invented in 1920 at all. There is simply no doubt about it: in 1920, the essential formula for Chanel No. 5 already existed. That fact, however, has given rise to endless rumor and speculation. With Chanel No. 5, nothing is ever as simple as it seems.

There are at least two distinct theories about the origins of the formula for Chanel No. 5. In the most titillating of those theories, people claim that Chanel No. 5 was an act of industrial espionage, its formula stolen from a competitor's laboratory in the south of France. This theory is part of that long, tangled history that connected Coco Chanel and her friend–and competitor–François Coty. As Edmonde Charles-Roux tells it:
²⁷

A close look reveals a mixed-up, madcap story. On the one hand, Yvonne Coty always claimed that Chanel No. 5 was 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
²⁸
.” She seemed to believe there was some possible buried connection. On the other hand, Ernest Beaux never worked for Coty. He had spent his entire career at Rallet, so he couldn't have been the fleeing chemist. Perhaps another perfumer at Coty had absconded with the formula and passed it along to Ernest–who offered it to Coco Chanel. That is the logical chain of speculation. One thing, at least, is certain: in 1927, as Charles-Roux says, someone at Coty
did
have a copy of the Chanel No. 5 formula or something perilously near to it. Coty's fragrance L'Aimant, launched that year, was too close to have been any kind of an accident. The question was, had Coty really had it all along, and was Chanel No. 5 the copy?

As deliciously scandalous as this idea of a stolen formula and an errant chemist might be, the connection has never been confirmed conclusively, and it may simply be–as Chanel suspects–one of those whispered stories that have grown up around the Chanel No. 5 legend. There is a perfectly simple reason why Coty had a copy of the formula for a Chanel No. 5 perfume in 1927. The year before, François Coty's massive perfume company had swallowed up yet another of his smaller competitors
²⁹
, the perfume house of Chiris. In fact, Coty had been closely involved with the operations at Chiris already for several decades. He had trained in their laboratories at around the turn of the century, and he had become business partners with several of the owners of this family company. In some ways, he had acted as though Chiris was his business–and its perfumes “his” holdings–since the time of the First World War. It was a sense of proprietorship that would fuel an intense and not always friendly spirit of competition between Coty and Coco Chanel. Now, in 1926, Coty had formally purchased the business and all its holdings–holdings that already included that familiar little perfume outfit called A. Rallet and Co. All the information that François Coty needed to produce his own version of Chanel No. 5 was sitting right there in the archives.

But the name on top of that formula in the Rallet archives wasn't Chanel No. 5. What Coty acquired was the recipe for another perfume, a perfume invented in 1914. It smelled unmistakably like Chanel No. 5 for one very simple reason: it was the secret scent behind the world's most famous perfume. This time, the madcap story was perfectly true.

On that storied day in his laboratory, Ernest Beaux offered Coco Chanel ten samples of a fragrance that he had invented, variations on two slightly divergent but common themes. In each bottle was a fresh take on the kind of scent that they both wanted to bring to the world as a daring modern composition. But the scents in those vials had their own history. They were based on a previous formula
³⁰
. In fact, they were based on a previous perfume.

When Coco Chanel asked Ernest to produce a signature scent and described what she imagined during the summer of 1920, he knew that he already had the perfume she needed. He didn't need to invent it. Or at least he had the basic structure. He certainly didn't need to filch it from another perfumer's laboratory. What he proposed was simple: before the war, he had created a beautiful but unlucky perfume, inspired by his researches into Robert Bienaimé's revolutionary 1912 aldehydic multiflore fragrance Quelques Fleurs. It had been a favorite scent of a certain unlucky czarina. Coco Chanel's aristocratic lover, Dmitri Pavlovich, knew it intimately and admired it. After all, that was why they were all there, wasn't it?

Ernest would give her Rallet No. 1–the perfume that began its life in 1914 as Le Bouquet de Catherine and that had been so evocative for Dmitri. Coco Chanel would make it her own. Perhaps she had explicitly asked him that summer for a scent like Rallet No. 1. It is hard to imagine that Dmitri would introduce Coco to Ernest without first introducing her to his creation. Or perhaps it was Ernest Beaux who first saw the link between the scent Coco Chanel wanted to give to the world and his unsung masterpiece and made the suggestion to her. On those subtle negotiations, history is silent.

What history is clear on is that the scent we know as Chanel No. 5 was perfected over several months in the late summer and autumn of 1920. That is what Ernest meant when he said “1920 precisely.” But that was not when this scent was invented, not essentially. Coco Chanel, of course, knew it, but it wasn't until as recently as 2007 that molecular analysis was able to unravel unequivocally Chanel No. 5's secret lineage.

Working from the rose and jasmine heart of Rallet No. 1, the agreement was that Ernest would transform Rallet No. 1 to make it cleaner and more audacious. In the new formulas, he experimented even more boldly with ways to balance those rich natural essences with modern synthetics, adding to the blend, for example, his own rose-scent invention, “Rose E.B.,” and the mixed notes of a jasmine field
³¹
that came from a new commercial ingredient called Jasmophore. He added more of the powdery notes of orris–iris root–and contrasted natural musks with cutting-edge elaborations. The result was a scent, as heady with rose and jasmine as it was, that was actually less scandalously expensive than Ernest Beaux's original Russian creation–and Chanel No. 5 was still on target to be the world's most costly fragrance in 1920.

What he agreed to create that summer would be a new perfume, but it would also be a continuation of the past and its losses. It captured the scents of Moscow and St. 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 catalog 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.

But for both Coco Chanel and the perfume she was about to launch to the world, the past was behind them. Now that it had been created, she was determined to make it a success. It would be a future that none of them could have ever imagined.

A
fter Coco Chanel and Ernest Beaux had agreed on the scent, all that was left to do was prepare to bring it to the attention of the world of fashion. Coco originally planned to test the market by giving samples of her new signature fragrance to her best clients as holiday gifts at the end of 1920, but she realized immediately that this was a perfume destined for greater things. She planned to start, instead, by introducing it to some of her glamorous friends who set the trends in the world of high society.