The Secret of Chanel No. 5

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  For many of us, appreciating the finer points of a fragrance is something mysterious, and the same was true when Coco Chanel set out to learn about perfume-making. A perfumer–known in the industry simply as a “nose"–is charged with the delicate and complicated task of creating, out of all the hundreds of thousands of possible scents in the world, a composition that both captures a precise idea or feeling and is capable of evolving gracefully and beautifully in time as it slowly disappears from our perception.

  As Coco Chanel quickly learned, the essentials of appreciating a fine fragrance begin with this art of blending aromas. Those who make perfumes talk about those scents in terms of “accords” and scent “families,” and this language is key to gaining a connoisseur’s appreciation for the art of perfume. Accords are a group of scents that blend naturally and provocatively together and, in blending, transform each other. They are fragrances within a fragrance, the building blocks of a complex perfume, and these accords are how experts define the different fragrance families.

  Today, there are at least a half-dozen different rubrics for diagramming all the possible categories of perfume3, and some of them are hopelessly, even occasionally comically, complex, with these families and subfamilies running into the dozens. In layman’s terms, however, in the 1920s there were five traditional categories: scents designated as oriental, fougère, leather, chypre, and floral. Some had ancient origins and traditions; some were twentieth-century innovations.

  When Cleopatra famously set sail to meet Mark Anthony4, she perfumed herself with sandalwood and filled the air with an incense of cinnamon, myrrh, and frankincense. Today, we could classify Cleopatra’s fragrances, based around the “amber” scents of plant barks and resins, simply as oriental perfumes. At the end of the nineteenth century, perfumers added to the warm, spicy aroma of those oriental ambers–materials like frankincense, sandalwood, and patchouli–another set of fragrance notes, another accord, based around animal musk and the orchid scents of vanilla.

  At the time when Coco Chanel was learning about perfume and about the daring innovations taking place in the chemistry of fragrance, perfumer Aimé Guerlain’s “ferociously modern” scent Jicky was considered the ultimate oriental. In fact, for many admirers it still is. Invented in 1889, Jicky was the first fragrance to use the then-exotic scent of patchouli, to which Guerlain added the aroma of vanilla. According to fragrance folklore, the classic oriental perfume Shalimar5–Jicky’s only rival as an oriental “reference” perfume–was invented in the 1920s when Jacques Guerlain, Aimé's nephew and the boy for whom Jicky was named, wondered what the perfume would smell like if he added an even larger dose of vanilla. The result was pure magic.

  Contemporary perfumes in the oriental family are now recognized as having their scent based around vanilla–or, more precisely, vanilla along with the vanilla effects created by pinesap vanillin and the almond-and-vanilla-scented aromatic ingredient heliotropine, a synthetic molecule created in the mid-1880s–and blended in an accord with the scents of amber plant resins and animal musk. On the market today, familiar mass-market oriental perfumes include Calvin Klein’s Obsession, Yves Saint Laurent’s Opium, and even Old Spice cologne.

  Oriental perfumes are meant to capture the scents of the East, but the perfumers with whom Coco Chanel talked that year also told her about a sea change in the approach to making fragrances. During the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, dozens of new “synthetic” aromatic materials were being discovered in laboratories around the world, and this would change the direction of perfume-making to the present day.

  For the first several millennia of its production, traditional perfumery relied on perhaps as few as a hundred natural scent materials6, and now new scents and new aromas, capable of creating new accords and olfactory effects, were being created with the help of modern science. Modern abstraction and innovation were coming to perfumery, and it was a new and fresh aesthetic–just the kind of thing that had always fascinated and inspired Coco Chanel as a designer.

  One of those new abstract fragrances was the family of scents known as a fougère. The word simply means “fern” in French, and these new scents were meant to evoke green leafy fronds and fresh woodlands–or at least the idea of them. As a rule, ferns don’t have any smell at all, and the category is beautifully conceptual. The name fougère comes from a great early fragrance by the firm of Houbigant, marketed as Fougère Royale (1882), or “royal fern.” It was a milestone in the history of modern fragrance: the first scent to use a synthetic aromatic, the compound coumarin, which smells of clean-cut hay. To this aroma, the perfumer Paul Parquet added the familiar cool scents of lavender and the dry-lichen aroma of oakmoss in a striking combination. The result was the refreshing coumarin-lavender-oakmoss accord still known today as a fougère. Fragrances that capture the essence of the fougère accord include such well-known scents as Geoffrey Beene’s Grey Flannel, Davidoff’s Cool Water, or the aromas of Brut Cologne.

  The perfumes known as leathers were also a modern innovation in perfume-making when Coco Chanel was visiting perfumers and their laboratories. The scents in fact have no leather in them, and they depend on the late-nineteenth-century discovery of the scent materials known as quinolines7. These molecules were first synthesized in the 1880s, and their smoky notes of tobacco and charcoal help these perfumes call forth the aromatic essence of soft, tanned leather. The most exclusive perfumes in this family–named after the premium birch-tar leathers of Europe’s eastern empire–were scents known as cuir de Russie, or “Russian leather.” It was the smell of the rare leathers used at the imperial courts to wrap precious jewels. Familiar staples today include perfumes such as Dior’s Fahrenheit and Lancôme’s Cuir.

  Then, there is the scent of chypre–history’s first international bestseller, the only real rival in the long history of perfume-making to compare with the celebrity of Chanel No. 5. Chanel No. 5 has been a phenomenon for the better part of a century. Only one perfume has ever been as famous and for even longer: chypre, that ancient fragrance with the warm wood-and-citrus notes of the rockrose plant resin labdanum and orange-scented bergamot, named after the Mediterranean island of Cyprus. The world’s oldest perfume family and Aphrodite’s scent sensation, it was popular until the mid-eighteenth century, when it mysteriously fell out of fashion. After 150 years in relative obscurity, however, perfumers in the first decades of the twentieth century were captivated by the idea of reimagining it for a new era. In 1895, the fragrance-industry giant Bourjois introduced a chypre to its catalog, and in 1909 Jacques Guerlain created Chypre de Paris. Parfums d’Orsay produced a chypre in 1912, and in 1913 came Bichara Malhame’s Chypre de Limassol8.

  Coco Chanel knew perfectly well, though, that it was with the release of François Coty’s Chypre in 1917 that history’s most ancient and famously erotic perfume once again was sweeping the cultural imagination. It wasn’t the same fragrance as that original chypre, which long ago sweetened the smoky air of Aphrodite’s temples. That recipe had already been lost for centuries. In the process of creating a new version of the world’s first perfume, however, François Coty also invented another of modern perfumery’s central accords: a blend of citrusy bergamot and woody labdanum, to which he added as a delicate counterpoint the lichen scent of oakmoss.

  These are still the essential notes of the family of fragrances known to perfumers as a chypre. Today, the family includes fragrances such as Estée Lauder’s Knowing and Dior’s Miss Dior. But those classic chypre perfumes were the scent phenomenon of the second decade of the twentieth century–the very moment when Coco Chanel was beginning to think seriously about scent and sensuality and what she intended to do with the connection.

  The fragrance family that fascinated her, though, wasn’t chypre. To follow in the footsteps of those recent innovations at Coty would have seemed too predictable and faddish for a designer intent on something that spoke to a new kind of feminine sexuality. It was the old, fa
miliar category of floral perfumes that she wanted to reimagine–fragrances based on the heady scent of blooming flowers. Today, it is a vast family of perfumes that includes everything from Nina Ricci’s L’Air du Temps and Jean Patou’s Joy to that unlikely phenomenon of the 1970s, Charlie.

  Fine fragrance begins with the quality of the materials, and this is especially true with floral perfumes, because the scents are so fleeting. In 1920, some of the finest natural materials in the world already came from Grasse. The roses and jasmine that bloom there are universally agreed to be nothing less than exquisite.

  Roses and jasmine, however, were scents that told two very different olfactory stories about the women who wore them. The traditional scent for a woman’s perfume, roses were discreetly and quietly lovely. Respectable women, women like Diana Lister Wyndham, could wear them without hesitation, and, until the second decade of the twentieth century, floral perfumes came in just one style, the style known today as soliflores.

  These soliflores were perfumes that captured the aroma of a single flower, and they were meant to be representational. Their formulas might blend several different floral essences, but one note–recognizably like the scent of some real flower–was meant to dominate the senses. At the turn of the century, the runaway bestseller was François Coty’s La Rose Jacqueminot (1903)9, the scent that made him a millionaire almost instantly. It was based around the specific scent of an heirloom rose variety, the rosa centifolia Jacqueminot, which grew in the fields of Grasse.

  A respectable woman who didn’t like the scent of roses might easily choose a perfume with a different note. She might wear something scented with gardenia, lilac, or lilies. Violet fragrances–especially those made from the powdery and subtle scents of the Parma violet, cultivated in Grasse since 1868–were ladylike standards. A special formulation called Violetta di Parma (1870) was the signature fragrance of the empress Marie Louise Bonaparte10, the second wife of Napoléon, and it became a nineteenth-century commercial powerhouse. When two chemists in 1893 perfected the technique of extracting from the Parma violet the precise compound that gave rise to its gentle aroma–molecules known as ionones–the scent became common even in ladies’ soaps. It was the similar discovery earlier in the nineteenth century of geraniol and phenylethyl alcohol–the essential elements of the “rose” scent–that also made that fragrance so ubiquitous.

  What a respectable woman would not do in the first years of the twentieth century was wear the scents of heavy “white flowers” like jasmine, tuberose, or ylang-ylang, known as “the poor man’s jasmine.” Their sweet and heavy scents were richly sensual, and, however gorgeous they might be, they were the smells of the licentious and illicit and arriviste.

  Until the second decade of the twentieth century, no one wore the floral fragrances today known as multiflores–floral scents in a mixed bouquet–for the simple reason that they hadn’t yet been invented. It wasn’t until 1912 that the perfume house of Houbigant launched the first true multiflore fragrance, a scent known simply as Quelques Fleurs, or “some flowers.” It was a perfume innovation: a scent that didn’t smell recognizably like any particular flower. Instead, it was the idea of a new flower, one that had never existed. It was the scent of an invented and imagined and lovely floral creation. It became an instant sensation, and the idea behind it–the idea of the essential abstraction–was one that Coco Chanel found utterly fascinating.

  After all, like the scent of fougère fragrances, Quelques Fleurs and these new multiflores that followed in the course of the next decade were wonderfully conceptual. As the scent historian Richard Stamelman puts it, the most experimental perfumers of the early twentieth century no longer “dreamed of imitating nature but of transforming the real,” with a new “emotive perfumery11.” In order to create these effects, they turned to something else completely modern: the science of scent creation. The perfumer behind Quelques Fleurs, Robert Bienaimé, experimented boldly not only with the idea of blending floral notes but also with the pioneering advances in modern aromatic synthetics, materials able to give a perfumer just a single note within a flower. He used especially the revolutionary and largely unknown materials known as aldehydes. The combination allowed for the artistic creation of a scent that was powerfully original. The world was on the brink of a new and golden era in perfumery because this molecular precision freed perfumers from the bonds of representational art, as surely as Pablo Picasso and the other artists whom Coco Chanel called friends freed a generation of painters.

  By the summer of 1920, although she still had a great deal to learn about the world of fragrance, Coco Chanel knew enough to understand her own vision clearly. She was already imagining a revolutionary integration of women’s fashion–the founding of a couture house and a sense of style that would epitomize the freedom and verve of those young flappers. From her maison she would sell them everything from dresses and jewelry to fragrance. In fact, it is impossible to understand Chanel No. 5 except as part of this larger project of redefining twentieth-century femininity.

  She also wanted that signature perfume to be a modern work of art and an abstraction. “[T]he perfume many women use,” she complained, “is not mysterious. … Women are not flowers. Why should they want to smell like flowers? I like roses, and the smell of the rose is very beautiful, but I do not want a woman to smell like a rose.”12 “I want,” she had decided, “to give women an artificial perfume13. Yes, I do mean artificial, like a dress, something that has been made. I don’t want a rose or lily of the valley, I want a perfume that is a composition.” A woman, she thought, “should smell like a woman and not like a flower14.”

  She was imagining one more thing, too: a scent that would utterly confound those lines between the fragrance worn by a nice, respectable girl and one worn by a seductress. She wanted a perfume that would be sexy and provocative and utterly clean. That summer, she was finally ready to create it. “A badly perfumed woman,” she once quipped, borrowing a line from the writer Paul Valéry, “is a woman without a future.”15 She intended to have a dazzling one.

  FIVE

  THE PRINCE AND THE PERFUMER

  Coco Chanel was ready, but she needed still one thing: a perfumer.

  She knew the outlines of the scent that she had in mind, and she had thrown herself into learning about the art and science of fragrance. That, however, wasn’t the same thing as being able to craft a gorgeous perfume. It wasn’t even close.

  A wonderful fragrance–the kind of scent able to withstand the test of time, decade after decade–is always a feat of engineering and inspiration. A scent might easily have as many as five or six dozen different notes in it, and the old-fashioned racks on which perfumers in the early twentieth century arranged those materials in imaginary chords were called organs. The musical references in both cases are telling1, because a perfume is a symphony of notes coming in and out, interacting, resonating, and, in time, disappearing. Coco Chanel had an excellent nose, and she knew the kind of scent that she wanted. But she didn’t possess the training or mastery needed to create it.

  So, instead, she set out to find the person who would be able to bring her vision into existence. She needed a talented perfumer, because she wanted something that would be daring and perfect. Once again, it was an affair of the heart that shaped the destiny of Coco Chanel and the story of the fragrance that would become Chanel No. 5.

  The south of France that summer of 1920 epitomized the beginning of the debauched decade often known simply as les années folles–the crazy years. Women sunbathed on the beaches wearing ropes of pearls2, and the bohemian rich staggered tipsy from extravagant party to extravagant party, from one bedroom to another. Coco Chanel, the rich and already famous designer, single-handedly made the suntan fashionable, and, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote of those times, “It was a whole race going hedonistic, deciding on pleasure3.”

  After the death of Boy, Coco had certainly made the decision to pursue pleasure. She spent her summers on the French Riviera, whe
re she entertained glamorous friends–among them some of her generation’s most renowned artists. Everyone was there to celebrate, among other things, the end of the First World War just a few months earlier, and some people had more to celebrate than others. Among the luckiest but also the most impoverished were the aristocratic waiters who served the champagne cocktails in those seaside villas. These were the so-called White Russians, the princes and princesses, dukes and duchesses, who had somehow escaped execution in Soviet Russia after the revolution of 19174–an insurrection that had brought a brutal end to the rule of the imperial czars and swept the Communists to power. Throughout France in the years that followed, refugee princesses worked as seamstresses, and the handful of royal men lucky enough to have been at that moment in history somewhere far from St. Petersburg now took jobs as salesmen. Coco Chanel took one of the exiled princes as her new lover.

  His name was Dmitri Pavlovich, and he was among the grand dukes of Russia and a cousin to the last czar, Nicholas II–who had been murdered, along with nearly all Dmitri’s family, in the revolution. Like Coco, Dmitri had been raised an orphan. There, however, the similarities between their early lives ended, because this Russian beau’s poverty was only a recent unhappy development.

  Coco Chanel’s new lover was a man with an astonishing history. Dmitri had grown up at the royal court in St. Petersburg during the twilight years of imperial splendor, but his childhood was anything but easy. While Boy Capel had balked at marrying Coco, his lowborn mistress, Dmitri’s aristocratic father had made a different decision and had married his paramour. He would pay for it dearly. For the unforgivable transgression of falling in love with a woman beneath him socially, the grand duke Paul Alexandrovich was sent into forced exile and told that he would need to leave his two young children behind. Their royal uncle Sergei would raise them instead.