The Secret of Chanel No. 5 (9 page)

When he received word in late 1919 that Rallet had moved its production to the village of La Bocca, just outside Grasse, the idea of the warm aromas of the south was a welcome reprieve. Mudyug Island was a cold and ugly place during the war.

By then the scent of the Arctic had captured his imagination, however. One of the Bolshevik prisoners at the camp in Arkangelsk later remembered a Lieutenant Beaux
²¹
: how, unlike so many other officers who interrogated them, he was never a heavy drinker. Instead, he would go for long walks along the coast of the White Sea and spent his afternoons secluded in a small, towered lighthouse at the end of the surf. There, the arctic scents surrounded him. He was struck by the exquisite freshness of the seaweed and cold air, and he was already dreaming of ways to capture its aroma. He had already guessed that those aldehydes would be the key to unraveling its secret.

No one knows exactly when Coco Chanel met Ernest Beaux, and no one knows exactly how Dmitri might have framed that introduction. Coco's friends Misia Sert and Paul Morand both believed that Dmitri was the one
²²
who made it happen. There are no additional details to tell the story of that pivotal first meeting.

But the how and the when of that meeting make no difference. What matters is this: when these three people came together, their formative experiences–experiences that would shape how they thought of scent and fragrance and what was possible–had all been lived. Each knew precisely what it was that he or she imagined. Marvelously, there was sympathy of vision. The couturière had her perfumer.

All that remained for the future of Chanel No. 5 was for Coco Chanel to convince Ernest Beaux to work for her–and for him to invent it.

Precisely how that invention happened is one of the most fascinating, complex, and hotly contested parts of the entire Chanel No. 5 legend.

A
ll legends have their beginnings, and the story of the birth of Chanel No. 5 is more glamorous and complicated than many. In the summer of 1920, as the legend goes, the meeting of a prince, a perfumer, and a fashion designer changed the history of fragrance–and the history of luxury–in the century that followed. Nothing could have been more coincidental or more fortunate.

Coco Chanel had asked Ernest Beaux that summer to create for her the signature perfume she was imagining, and she wanted a sultry freshness. Ernest was hesitant
¹
. Creating a scent for a couturière, after all, was still largely unchartered territory. That summer, Coco Chanel would be only the third designer in history to venture into the field. All her time spent studying the perfume business now paid dividends–along with the keen sense of scent she had possessed from the outset. After several days exploring concepts together in the laboratory, Ernest was persuaded that the couturière was serious and that she knew what she was trying to accomplish. Still puzzling over how to unlock the clean scents of the polar north, he also thought that he knew precisely the note her fragrance needed. It was a vision shared by both creators.

Won over, Ernest accepted the commission. He would design for her the scent that they were both building in the imagination, and he worked for months crafting it. Finally the day came when he invited her to test the fragrances he had created. She would choose the perfect one from among ten different samples, each a variation on a theme that he already knew had fantastic potential.

There in front of them were ten small glass vials, labeled from one to five and twenty to twenty-four. The gap in the numbers reflected the fact that these were scents in two different–but complementary–series
²
, different “takes” on a new fragrance. Each of these small glass vials contained a new fragrance innovation, based on the core scents of May rose, jasmine, and those daring new fragrance molecules known as aldehydes. According to the legend, in one of the vials a careless laboratory assistant had accidentally added a massive overdose of this last and still largely undiscovered ingredient, confusing a 10 percent dilution for the pure, full-strength material.

In the room that day, surrounded by rows of perfumer's scales, beakers, and pharmaceutical bottles, Coco Chanel sniffed and considered. She slowly drew each sample beneath her nose, and in the room there was the quiet sound of her slow inhalation and exhalation. Her face revealed nothing. It was something everyone who knew her always remembered, how impassive she could seem. In one of those perfumes, something in the catalog of her senses resonated, because she smiled and said, at last, with no indecision: “number five.” “Yes,” she said later, “that is what I was waiting for. A perfume like nothing else. A woman's perfume, with the scent of a woman
³
.”

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 shared
⁴
. The number five was a special part of theosophism
⁵
–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 destiny
⁶
, 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 luck
⁷
.”

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 it
⁸
,” 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.

W
hat 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 molecules
⁹
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 air
¹⁰
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 things
¹¹
. 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 tannins
¹³
, but every oenophile knows that these mellow and fade and finally disappear. One of the earliest aldehydes discovered, cinnamaldehyde
¹⁴
, 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 strawberries
¹⁵
. 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 nerve
¹⁶
. 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 fibers
¹⁷
. 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 Circle
¹⁸
, 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.