‘I only wear Chanel No 5...’
100 years since it was launched, we look back at how Coco Chanel made her most iconic fragrance and why women still love Chanel No.5
With one bottle of Chanel No.5 reportedly sold every 30 seconds, it’s undoubtedly the fragrance that sits on more dressing tables around the world than any other. A stylish little bottle with a mighty impact, it’s become a scent for all women, as adored by housewives as it is by the biggest stars of all time. Even if it’s not your signature scent, chances are a passing spritz of Chanel No.5 is enough to transport you to another time and place, whether that’s the memory of your first ever ‘grown-up’ bottle of perfume or the scent your mum never left the house without gently dabbing on her wrists.
Even now, 100 years since the first bottle was sold in 1921 on the fifth day of the fifth month (Chanel believed the number five to be lucky), it is still gaining new fans with each upcoming generation.
Just as Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel set out to revolutionise the way women looked with her stylish, no-frills fashions, in Chanel No.5 she set out to transform the way women smelt. Up until this point, women’s perfumes
The ‘just washed’ scent instantly reminded Chanel of her mother’s laundry
were heavy, rather boring scents packed into over-fussy bottles, with the smell of single flowers such as rose or lily-of-the-valley considered the ‘proper’ fragrance for respectable women, while racy ladies wore brazen scents such as musk or jasmine.
Chanel had a vision for a scent that threw away the rulebook and blended these two ideas together, tearing apart the divide between different ‘types’ of women to create a smell that was both alluring and pure. Meanwhile, having grown up as the daughter of a laundry woman, the smell of soap and freshly scrubbed skin forever in her nose, she also wanted a scent that gave a smell of all-day freshness that had so far proved elusive in contemporary perfumes.
All this was a dream until in the late summer of 1920 Chanel went on holiday to the Cote d’Azur with her lover, the Grand Duke Pavlovich. Here she met the daring perfumier to the Russian royal family, Ernest Beaux, who she commissioned to make a perfume that, “Smells like a woman, not like a flower bed”.
Ernest got to work creating a bouquet of around 80 different scents blended together, including jasmine, ylang-ylang and sandalwoods along with aldehydes, which are chemicals known to help scents last longer.
Up to that point, aldehydes had only been used sparingly in perfumes but Ernest added them in unprecedented quantities to create a scent that would linger on the skin as well as giving off a clean, ‘just washed’ scent that instantly reminded Chanel of her mother’s laundry.
After several months of experimentation, Ernest
presented ten different samples of this new perfume to Chanel. Just one sniff of the sample labelled ‘No.5’ and she knew this was the one. The simple name Chanel No.5 came without much further thought, as did the sleek, simple, crystal clear bottle that was modelled on the shape of classic whisky decanters, in keeping with the whole Chanel ethos of masculine, streamlined designs.
Soon Chanel was inviting friends to Riviera restaurants where she would spray her new scent around the table.
Almost immediately, every woman who passed by stopped to ask what that incredible smell was.
Chanel No.5 was literally stopping women in their tracks and soon whispers were circulating around every ladies circle about this revolutionary new fragrance that by 1929 had become the world’s best-selling perfume.
In 1937, Chanel appeared in Harper’s Bazaar magazine as the face of her own fragrance, kickstarting another part of Chanel No.5’s history as iconic as the scent itself: the advertising campaigns.
From the moment in 1952 when Marilyn Monroe revealed that she wore only Chanel No.5 to bed, the most glamorous starlets of the day wanted to be associated with this unparalleled fragrance. Suzy Parker and Ali McGraw were among the famous faces to front the fragrance in the Fifties and Sixties usually promoting the slogan, ‘every woman alive loves Chanel No.5’.
But it is probably Chanel’s Seventies advert starring Catherine Deneuve that is the most memorable for the fact it contained no slogans, no advertising jargon, just her face and a bottle of Chanel No.5. In fact, Chanel’s advertising became so legendary it even attracted the attention of acclaimed director Ridley Scott who created the perfume’s TV commercials in the Seventies and Eighties. Even in recent years, stars from Nicole Kidman to French actress Marion Cotillard have jumped at the chance to appear in a Chanel No.5 advert.
For all its starry associations, though, the enduring success of Chanel No.5 seems to be its availability to all women and the fact that every little bottle is a portal to 100 years of glamour and luxury anyone can enjoy.