The Secret of Chanel No. 5

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  What, Ernest asked her next, would she name her new fragrance? In Coco Chanel’s mind, there was never any question. The number five had always been her special talisman. It was the memory of all the childhood scents and the mystery of numbers surrounding her at Aubazine. It had been Boy Capel’s magic number, too, something else they shared4. The number five was a special part of theosophism5–the fashionable religion of mystics and séances and alternate dimensions that she and Boy Capel had enthusiastically studied together. It was the number of quintessence. A fortune-teller had told her that it was the number of her special destiny6, and she believed it. How lucky it was that the fifth sample–the one with that overdose of aldehydes–had captured her imagination! “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 luck7.”

  Good luck, Coco Chanel, and the number five. There was a bit of an inside joke that she was making with herself, too. Her other little nickname was “Bonheur.” In fact, despite its absence from her birth certificate, it is often given as her middle name. In French, the word for good luck is bonheur, and, although known around the world as Coco, Gabrielle “Bonheur” Chanel seemed destined for some good fortune. A perfume, she once sermonized, “should resemble the person wearing it8,” and it seemed fitting that her signature perfume should carry her luck–and her number. In hindsight, there is no doubting her intuition.

  If that legend about the laboratory assistant’s error is true, then the creation of Chanel No. 5 was also a serendipitous turn of events for Ernest Beaux. It was a perfume that would make him even more celebrated than he already was in the fragrance industry. Much of what had happened to create this scent–a scent recognized almost instantly as something beautiful, something important–had nothing to do with luck, though. It was a matter of skill, insight, and devotion.

  A willingness to embrace modernity was part of his brilliance, too. The floral heart of Chanel No. 5 mixed some of perfumery’s most luxurious and traditional aromas, scents like rose, jasmine, ylang-ylang, and sandalwood. But the secret to Chanel No. 5 was in those aldehydes and what Ernest had done with them. They were ingredients that would change the smells of an entire century, and they would make Chanel No. 5 perhaps the greatest perfume of the golden era.

  What is it about aldehydes that make the perfumes that include them so special? What, indeed, are they at all? This is where perfume meets chemistry. Today, aldehydes are in many of the scents around us. They are among the most familiar aromas of the world we inhabit, but they are especially recognizable in laundry detergents and room fresheners, in our shampoos and our antiperspirants. They are at the heart of the smell we think of simply as “clean.”

  In the first decades of the twentieth century, however, aldehydes were still a novel ingredient. While the earliest ones were discovered in the nineteenth century, most didn’t exist in isolation until 1903, when the chemists Georges Darzens and E. E. Blaise, working independently, found ways to separate and synthesize a large group of fragrance molecules9 that would revolutionize the history of smell in the twentieth century. Chanel No. 5 played a seminal role in that scent story.

  Understanding aldehydes is a long and complicated business, but at the most basic level they are molecules with a very particular kind of arrangement among their oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon atoms, and they are a stage in the natural process that happens when exposure to oxygen turns an alcohol to acid.

  To put it simply, think of what happens when a bottle of wine remains open too long on the kitchen counter: it eventually turns to vinegar. Somewhere along the way, without anyone ever noticing it, the alcohol first turns to an aldehyde. A chemist would say that the hydrogen in the ethanol, the kind of alcohol in wine, combines with the oxygen in the air10 to create, through an organic reaction, first, acetaldehyde and, then, acetic acid–known simply as vinegar. Of course, what matters most about that bottle of wine is enjoying the fragrant notes of the bouquet long before then.

  The problem for chemists at the beginning of the twentieth century was how to use science to stop that reaction artificially at the midpoint and to “create” aldehydes. Because the reaction that takes an alcohol to an acid doesn’t stop naturally when there is oxygen present, scientists commonly talk of aldehydes as synthetic molecules–molecules created in a laboratory. It would be more accurate to say, however, that they are isolated and stabilized by chemists, thus making possible their revolutionary use as fragrance ingredients.

  Aldehydes have the smell of many things11. Some smell like warm wax and snuffed candles. Some have the scent of burnt matchsticks. Others smell like fatty soap or citrus pomade. Sometimes, there are hints reminiscent of rose and the rich oils of jasmine. Aldehydes are categorized in a general way by the number of carbon atoms they possess, and, smelled alone, one of the aldehydes in Chanel No. 5 (C-12) smells precisely of fresh laundry bleached in the sun. Other aldehydes, unfortunately, accost those unlucky enough to smell them with the dubious notes of rotting fruit or burnt rubber. They are often, however, beautiful scents, and perfumers have long noted that some among them have the scent of winter. The “unblemished whiteness of [these] aldehydes,” writes one fragrance expert, is the smell of “powder snow.”12

  Today, there is a certain wariness that comes with the idea of synthetics, but the art of modern fragrances could not exist without them. Chanel No. 5 might be perfume industry’s modern monstre, but, if it comes down to it, aldehydes are actually perfectly organic: nothing more than carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen, the stuff of earth and air and our own bodies. They occur naturally all around us. They are synthetic simply in the sense that the natural chemical reaction is arrested and the scent is isolated in a laboratory.

  The trouble with aldehydes is that they are fleeting. They are part of what gives a fine wine its heady bouquet and smooth tannins13, but every oenophile knows that these mellow and fade and finally disappear. One of the earliest aldehydes discovered, cinnamaldehyde14, is the molecule that gives the scent to cinnamon. Aldehydes are also there in the peel of an orange, in those bright bursts of zesty aroma. They are in the needles of fir trees and the seeds of coriander in our kitchens and in stalks of lemongrass. In order to be used as independent ingredients in fragrances, however, they all have to be isolated by a chemist, who takes from the scent of fresh pine needles only that thing that is somehow waxy and greenly astringent and leaves behind the rest, which is the smell of fir trees.

  The most surprising thing about aldehydes in the use of perfumery is that their effects aren’t created simply through the unique smells that they lend to a fragrance. They have, of course, aromas of their own. As Jacques Polge, the chief perfumer at Chanel, likes to put it, adding aldehydes to the rich scents of florals is very much like what happens when a cook drizzles fresh lemon over strawberries15. It isn’t just a matter of a second aroma complementing the first. Instead, the lemon transforms and sweetens the experience of the fruit, lifts its flavors, and intensifies them. Aldehydes in a perfume have the same effect.

  This aldehydic “lifting” of a perfume’s rich aromas is, even to scientists, a perplexing business, but it probably has more to do with sensation than with scent. Certain aromas–but the aromas of aldehydes especially–set off complicated reactions in the nervous system. Chemists will also argue that aldehydes have the effect of stimulating what is known as the trigeminal nerve16. It’s the nose’s way of experiencing feelings of hot and cold, pain and pleasure–the warp and woof of olfactory satisfaction.

  As one expert explains, just as external temperature variations are registered with every inhalation, “most aromatic compounds can [also] stimulate trigeminal nerve fibers17. Their stimulation induces sensations such as irritation, burning, stinging, tingling, and freshness.” Aldehydes in a perfume give just those last feelings: the experience of tingling freshness, a little frisson of an electric sparkle. They make Chanel No. 5
feel like cool champagne bubbles bursting in the senses.

  Rather than a bottle of bubbly, Ernest Beaux probably would have described the sensation more along the lines of taking an invigorating breath of cold fresh air, and he was right to connect aldehydes with the bracing scents of the Arctic. There at the northern reaches of the world, stationed along the Polar Circle18, he guessed what modern science has confirmed and dissected: there exists a connection between the smell of clean snow on cold earth and the aromatic whiteness of these special fragrance materials. 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, and Ernest could simply smell it.

  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 manufactured19.” 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 remembered20: 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 expensive21. 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 aldehydes22.” 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 aldehydes23 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 honors24.

  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 compositions25.” 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.

  Chanel 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 war26.”

  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

  the development of No. 5 … proceeded in a rather heavy atmosphere reminiscent of the whispered machinations that herald a palace revolution. … Plenty of intrigue, sudden reversals and secret alliances. Nothing was missing from the script, not even the spectacular disappearance of one of Coty’s top chemists. The deserter fled, clutching to his bosom the fruit of long years of research: the formula for a perfume Coty could not make up its mind to put on the market because it cost so much to produce. That was one reason why this chemist went over to the enemy: he was afraid his invention would never be made available to the public. … Was his name Ernest Beaux? All queries being met by the impenetrable silence of those who know, we must be content to leave this point in darkness. But one thing is certain: about seven years later, Coty was producing a perfume that was almost exactly the same as No. 5. But although it sold tolerably well, Aimant never made a dent in the Chanel market.

  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 France28.” 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 fleein
g 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 competitors29, 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.