The Secret of Chanel No. 5

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  Little surprise, then, that the most recent face of Chanel No. 5 during the second decade of the new century is the girlishly sexy Audrey Tautou, who first came to international fame as the title character in Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain (2001; released in English as Amélie), director Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s story of a charming Parisian waitress at the Café des Deux Moulins. Tautou appeared in short films advertising Chanel No. 5–directed again by Jeunet (2009)–and in the feature-length film by Anne Fontaine Coco Avant Chanel (2009), where she plays the young Coco Chanel during her years as a showgirl and “green-girl” mistress. Those first links with Hollywood that Coco Chanel explored in the 1930s had once again come full circle.

  The same is true of the fragrances. Since the 1970s, the new perfumes have also been a nod to tradition and that earlier age of glamour–even as they have been designed to appeal to a new generation of women. In fact, in some ways, the scents since the 1970s have been a series of creative refashionings of le monstre and a return to the legacy of those early Chanel numbers. The most celebrated new fragrance has been Jacques Polge’s Coco (1984) and the updated version of it released in 2001 as Coco Mademoiselle, both inspired by the baroque aesthetics of Coco Chanel’s private Paris salon. The scents are entirely distinct from Chanel No. 5. Both Coco and Coco Mademoiselle–rather unusually–are sold, though, in the signature No. 5 bottle, an appeal to young women who want the luxury status of the iconic bottle but don’t yet want the iconic fragrance.

  Other new scents have eschewed the signature art deco flacon, but there has been a return since the 1970s to the renewed proliferation of multiple Chanel numbered fragrances. The modern reintroduction of the numbers began with the release in 1970 of Chanel No. 19–reputedly the reformulated version of Coco’s illicit red-label Mademoiselle Chanel No. 1, the scent that she called her “super Chanel No. 5.” A return to the numbers is largely a very recent campaign, however. In 2007, several new numbered perfumes appeared, all part of the boutique-only range of ultrapremium Chanel fragrances marketed as Les Exclusifs–"the exclusives.” As one journalist notes, these are all fragrances “based on the complicated trajectory of the founder’s difficult and flamboyant life … scents she cherished, outdoors and at home.”18

  Some of these scents were entirely fresh “address-inspired” perfumes like 31 rue Cambon, 28 La Pausa, and now a Chanel No. 18–which takes its name from the Chanel jewelry boutique at 18 Place Vendôme in Paris. Many of the scents were updated re-releases of the original and much-loved scents in the Chanel perfume range of the 1920s and 1930s, however. The company returned to production once-famous early Chanel fragrances such as Bois des Îles and Cuir de Russie. And it relaunched Chanel No. 22, one of Ernest Beaux’s original ten samples and always a fragrance closely tied to the history and to the innovative aldehydic scents of Chanel No. 5. Then, there has also been Jacques Polge’s consciously modern updating of Chanel No. 5 itself–Eau Première. According to Polge, it is the scent of Chanel No. 519 and nothing else, but for each accord he has added more ingredients, working with innovative new scent materials discovered since the 1920s. Eau Première is an attempt to imagine the Chanel No. 5 that Ernest Beaux would have crafted if he had lived at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

  For much of its early history, the scent of Chanel No. 5 circulated on the world’s fragrance market in different versions, from Coco Chanel’s red-label perfumes to Chanel No. 22 or Chanel No. 46, Rallet No. 1 or Coty’s L’Aimant. Today, that trend has once again come full circle, too. This time, however, the marketing has been innovative and ingenious. It has been a coordinated and evolving campaign that has made Chanel No. 5 more famous than ever, but it has worked for the same reason the Second World War made it an icon: these films and fragrances are an invitation to mystery and fantasy.

  While Chanel’s marketing, distribution, and brand management breathed new life into Chanel No. 5 those last critical decades of the twentieth century, its future as the world’s most famous perfume has never been a certainty. The perfume has simply faced new dangers from different quarters. After all, even the best marketing and most ingenious, decadent advertising ultimately mean nothing if there is no product to sell. And in the fall of 2009, the press was reporting that it looked like Chanel No. 5 was in serious danger of disappearing altogether.

  EIGHTEEN

  THE END OF MODERN PERFUMERY

  In September of 2009, newspapers around the world carried headlines announcing, “Rules put famous perfumes ‘at risk’ “ and “Allergen rules may alter scents of great perfumes.”1 The blogsphere was buzzing with the news that the end of Chanel No. 5 was near and that “twentieth-century perfumery [is] history.”2 The source of the controversy was a new set of amendments from the perfume industry’s self-regulatory body, the International Fragrance Association, usually known simply as IFRA, which for the first time added jasmine to its list of restricted materials–that rare and coveted jasmine from Grasse included.

  Word spread that the notorious forty-third IFRA amendment would limit jasmine to 0.7 percent3 of any perfume, and this proposed restriction led to immediate fears about the demise of the world’s most famous jasmine fragrance, the iconic Chanel No. 5 parfum. Massive proportions of the natural jasmine of Grasse, counterbalanced by the overdose of aldehydes, was the tightrope act at the heart of Ernest Beaux’s genius scent. Decrease the jasmine, and the whole thing was ruined.

  Not since the beginning of the war, when Gregory Thomas was attempting to smuggle precious supplies out of France, had Chanel No. 5 itself been in this kind of jeopardy. Without that stockpile of roses and jasmine, it would have been a different scent–with a different quality and a different history. Had its ingredients been stopped on their way to the United States, the partners would have needed to reformulate the perfume using synthetics, and it would have been a massive–and demoralizing–project. Producing Chanel No. 5 in New Jersey would have been less feasible, the opportunity to distribute the fragrance through the commissaries less brilliantly timed. Those key factors allowed the perfume to permeate the American market. Now, having triumphed for nearly ninety years as the world’s most famous fragrance–having weathered the Great Depression and a world war, the changes of the 1960s and overexposure–it seemed from the headlines that here at last was an insurmountable obstacle.

  At stake was the thorny issue of perfumes and allergies, and the restrictions on “naturals” like jasmine remain the topic of one of the perfume industry’s most intense debates. IFRA instituted these recommendations on jasmine–the natural floral essence, not the synthetic accord–because it can be a skin irritant for some unlucky people. Specifically, the problem, from an allergist’s perspective, is that people are far more likely to be sensitive to natural plant materials than to a single, isolated scent molecule. Accordingly, from the scientific and industry-safety perspective, hand-harvested naturals–not ones created in laboratories–pose the greatest risk.

  In this case, the disaster Chanel No. 5 faced was a nightmare narrowly averted. In a statement to the press, in-house deputy perfumer Christopher Sheldrake assured Chanel No. 5 enthusiasts, “When the new IFRA standards were issued we immediately checked the percentages of jasmine grandiflora and [jasmine] sambac4 in our finished products, and in none of our fragrances is the recommended level exceeded.” There would be, the company promised, no changes to Chanel No. 5.

  In the back of everyone’s mind, however, was the thought that, when IFRA revisits the question, further restrictions on jasmine are possible. Next time, perhaps modern perfumery wouldn’t be so lucky. For now, though, Chanel No. 5 was spared. Its scent would stay the same.

  The question is: Chanel No. 5 would stay precisely the same as what? While the jasmine regulations posed an undeniable threat to the perfume’s future, one of the keys to understanding Chanel No. 5's lasting success is to recognize something fundamental about the perfume itself: the scent that enticed those passing by Coco Chanel’s table in Cannes back on
that late summer evening in 1920 wasn’t precisely the same as a bottle of Chanel No. 5 perfume on the market today. That was always going to be impossible, and, over the course of so many decades, government and industry regulations have banned more than one of the ingredients in Ernest Beaux’s original formula.

  The amazing thing isn’t those changes–it’s the fact that Chanel No. 5 smells as close to the 1920 original as it does despite them. Remarkably close. So close that very few of us would ever notice the difference. That has been the goal of Chanel’s in-house perfumers. Unlike some of the other great perfumes of the early part of the twentieth century, changes in Chanel No. 5 have been only minor and only when absolutely required, at least since the 1950s. Long before the new IFRA announcement, moreover, concerns about maintaining No. 5's integrity were already on the minds of Chanel’s perfumers. For decades they have been negotiating the end of the use of certain ingredients.

  Among the ingredients at risk by the end of the 1970s were the sultry musks that grounded Chanel No. 5's scent. These are only marginally less important than the jasmine at its heart and those effervescent aldehydes that lift the perfume’s opulent aromas. It was clear by the time Catherine Deneuve became the celebrated “face” of Chanel No. 5 that some of the most important musks would soon have to be abandoned.

  Natural animal materials smell rich and wonderful, and muscone–the term for the aromatic core of the musk taken from the Moschus moschiferus, a deer native to the Tonquin region of Tibet and China that is widely recognized as of superior quality–is the scent of warm, clean skin5. Other musks came from the glands of civet cats and beavers, and their scents are undeniably sexy. Those aromas were always part of the perfume that Coco Chanel imagined. The methods for obtaining these reproductive fluids, however, are understandably delicate–and that fact, along with overharvesting, has meant that all of the natural musk scents have always been fabulously expensive.

  Toward the end of the nineteenth century, with the development of organic chemistry in the world of fragrance, perfumers started looking for the new effects and notes that were to revolutionize perfumery. In the 1880s, when a chemist named Albert Bauer was working with explosives, including the derivatives of TNT (trinitrotoluene), he noticed in the test tube a compound that smelled startlingly like deer musk. Recognizing a marketing opportunity, he began selling the molecule to perfumers as “Musk Bauer,” and it was the world’s first “nitro-musk6,” the name for the category of nitrogen-and-oxygen-based molecules that imitated the smells of natural musk.

  The first bottles of Chanel No. 5 used generous doses of these nitro-musks, and perfumers loved their scent. In fact, they still lament their loss. It turned out, though, that, as beautiful as they smelled, they posed a number of hazards. Based around molecules that were essentially explosive, they were chemically unstable, and this was true especially if they were exposed to sunlight, when they tended to degrade and react in ways that were sometimes neurologically toxic. With the sole exception of musk ketone, which was the only nitro-musk to meet the tough new international safety standards, they were banned during the 1980s. Today musk ketone is still permitted only with strict limitations7. The perfumes that used them had to be reformulated. Chanel No. 5 was among them.

  Finding a way to replace the depth and richness of these nitro-musks required a good deal of commitment. The suppression of nitro-musks heralded the end for some of the revered fragrances of the 1970s and 1980s. Unfortunately, the ways of harvesting natural animal musk from the nether glands of some unfortunate fellow creatures made using them too unpalatable. There have been no natural musks in Chanel No. 5 since sometime in the early 1990s.

  Chanel No. 5 fans need not worry, though, because Chanel No. 5 still has those rich, warm scents of skin and that note of intense sensuality that Coco Chanel always wanted. As Christopher Sheldrake explains, while those nitro-musks were wonderful, powerful, and inexpensive8, they were not irreplaceable. There are ways to re-create their warmth and powdery textures in a perfume. It’s just that they can’t be replaced on the cheap, and most fragrance houses aren’t prepared to spend the money. And, as perfumer Virginia Bonofiglio quips, “You can’t make cheap that smells like Chanel No. 59.”

  Staying true to the original fragrance is the great challenge of any historically important perfume. Allowing the scent of Chanel No. 5 to change with the decades would have been far simpler. Even without evolving regulations, it is remarkably difficult to make any expensive perfume–one made with those complex sub-scents of naturals–smell consistent from one year to the next. Yet good perfumers manage it year after year and, in the cases of legacy scents like Shalimar or Joy or Chanel No. 5, decade after decade, despite the fact that, as in wines, the natural materials that go into a fragrance are always affected by vintages. At the most essential level, flowers also change their aromas from year to year, from place to place, sometimes dramatically.

  The skill of a perfumer, then, is not only in innovation and invention, but in taking into account the ever-shifting changes in the floral components and finding the right proportions needed to re-create a scent that is somehow timeless. It is always the search to create again and to preserve in nuance and complexity the essence of something fleeting. Above all, as Coco Chanel knew, perfume is an act of memory.

  Jacques Polge is only the third chief perfumer in the history of Les Parfums Chanel, so the chain of olfactory memory and tradition is unbroken in Chanel No. 5's case. Illustrating the importance perfumers attach to this process, Polge tells a story about how his predecessor, Henri Robert, used to watch Ernest Beaux correct an entire batch of Chanel No. 5 perfume in the production facility10 by inhaling deeply and adding just a few drops of some particular essence or another to make it smell like his original creation.

  When Jacques Polge became perfumer in 1978, he faced a similar task of maintaining the scent’s legacy, and the problem Chanel faced then wasn’t just one of the soon-to-be-banned nitro-musks. It was–as always with this scent–one of flowers. The production of jasmine from Grasse was declining, and Polge went to the south of France to meet the farmers who grew this unique jasmine, hoping to convince them to grow more of it at the finest level of quality. What he discovered was that the plantations were dying. Less expensive exotic jasmines were flooding the world markets, making it not worthwhile for the farmers to try to save them. Without jasmine–much of it from the fields of Grasse–in large quantities, however, Chanel No. 5 would be compromised.

  Responding to this threat, in the early 1980s Chanel brokered an exclusive long-term agreement with the Mul family11–which has been growing flowers for the perfume industry in Grasse for five generations–to save the last commercial jasmine plantations from destruction. For this project, a resistant jasmine stock was found onto which could be grafted the traditional jasmine of Grasse. Today, at least 99 percent of the production of jasmine from Grasse, universally agreed to be the finest quality in the world, goes into just one perfume: Chanel No. 5.

  New IFRA allergy restrictions won’t threaten the perfume either, because for several years researchers at Chanel have been committed to finding a permanent solution. Among those hundreds of molecules in natural jasmine, it is only one or two that have the potential to cause even the most sensitive among us any problems. Creating a synthetic jasmine as nuanced and subtle as the natural jasmine of Grasse would be an impossible undertaking, but breeding just one or two molecules out of a plant or finding a technique to remove one or two molecules from an extract is entirely possible. Soon, Chanel hopes simply to have resolved the problem of jasmine sensitivity entirely12. They hope that, eventually, the jasmine from Grasse will be something anyone can wear without hesitation–no matter how daringly high the doses.

  For now, the legacy of the perfume is safe. Despite changes around it, the world’s most famous fragrance remains essentially unchanged and timeless.

  In the history of Chanel No. 5, there have been a series of moments like this: moments wh
ere it could have failed to keep pace with cultural changes or where its changes might have been too dramatic. The greatest temptation with any product over a ninety-odd-year history is the one to alter it beyond recognition in the name of progress. Indeed, reformulation is a great temptation in the face of slipping sales or marketing missteps, and many perfume houses have been unable to resist this kind of updating. At that moment in the 1970s when the brand management for Chanel No. 5 was being fundamentally reimagined–a moment when, for the first time, Chanel No. 5 ran the risk of seeming mass-market and outdated–it would have been easy to experiment with the formula and relaunch it as a “new” No. 5. It might even have seemed a logical extension of the strategy that first led the partners at Les Parfums Chanel to introduce alternative versions of the scent with Chanel No. 22 and Chanel No. 46 in the 1920s and 1940s.

  Today, the scent of Chanel No. 5–particularly at the luxurious parfum concentration considered the ultimate version–remains true to the original 1920 fragrance. It’s the scent that the perfumers at Chanel work to preserve, and that has meant, in the face of changes, finding ways to adapt without compromise.

  And this commitment to reinventing itself–in order to remain itself–at any cost is the reason why, generation after generation, Chanel No. 5 has persisted as a perfume and as a symbol. At any number of critical moments in the history of this fragrance, the scent that first enticed diners on a warm night in the south of France might have disappeared. It might have faded into obscurity like so many of the other great scents of that golden age of perfumery. It might have ended with the death in the 1970s of the complicated woman whose name it carried or have quietly disappeared from the cultural imagination.