Chanel No. 5 is the first perfume launched by Parisian couturier Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel. The French government reports that a bottle of Chanel No. 5 is sold every thirty seconds and generates sales of $100 million a year. It was developed by Russian-French chemist and perfumer Ernest Beaux. It is often considered the world’s most famous perfume
Aesthetic inspiration for a new fragrance
Traditionally fragrance worn by women had adhered to two basic categories. “Respectable” women favored the pure essence of a single garden flower. Sexually provocative perfumes heavy with animal musk or jasmine were associated with women of the demi-monde, prostitutes or courtesans Chanel felt the time was right for the debut of a scent that would epitomize the boyish, modern flapper that would speak to the liberated spirit of the 1920s.
Iconography of the No. 5 name
From her earliest days at Aubazine, the number five had potent associations for Chanel. Aubazine had been founded by Cistercians, a Catholic order who placed great emphasis on numerology. The number five was especially esteemed as signifying the pure embodiment of a thing, its spirit, its mystic meaning. The paths, which led Chanel to the cathedral for daily prayer, were laid out in circular patterns repeating the number five.
Her affinity for the number five co-mingled with the abbey gardens, and by extension the lush surrounding hillsides abounding with cistus, a five-petal rose. It is noteworthy that the Cistercians, an ancient branch of Catholicism, derived the name of their order from this very flower.
In 1920, when presented with small glass vials of scent numbered 1-5 and 20-24, for her assessment, she chose the sample composition contained in the fifth vial. Chanel told her master perfumer, Ernest Beaux, whom she had commissioned to develop a fragrance with modern innovations:
“I present my dress collections on the fifth of May, the fifth month of the year and so we will let this sample number five keep the name it has already, it will bring good luck.”
Design of the bottle
Chanel envisioned a design that would be an antidote for the over-elaborate, precious fussiness of the crystal fragrance bottles then in fashion popularized by Lalique and Baccarat. Her bottle would be “pure transparency…an invisible bottle.” It is generally considered that the bottle design was inspired by the Charvet toiletry bottles carried by her lover, Arthur “Boy” Capel in his leather traveling case. Some say it was the whiskey decanter he used that she admired and wished to reproduce it in “exquisite, expensive, delicate glass.”
The first bottle produced in 1919, is not the Chanel No.5 bottle known today. The original container had small, delicate, rounded shoulders and was sold only in Chanel boutiques to select clients. In 1924, when “Parfums Chanel,” incorporated, the glass proved too thin to sustain shipping and distribution. This is the point in time when the only significant design change took place. The bottle was modified with square, faceted corners.
In a marketing brochure issued in 1924, “Parfums Chanel” described the vessel, which contained the fragrance:
“… the perfection of the product forbids dressing it in the customary artifices. Why rely on the art of the glassmaker…Mademoiselle is proud to present simple bottles adorned only by…precious teardrops of perfume of incomparable quality, unique in composition, revealing the artistic personality of their creator.”
Unlike the bottle, which has remained the same since redesigned in 1924, the stopper has gone through numerous modifications. The original stopper was a small glass plug. The octagonal stopper, which became a brand signature, was instituted in 1924 when the bottle shape was changed. The 1950s gave the stopper a bevel cut and a larger, thicker silhouette. In the 1970s the stopper became even more prominent, but in 1986 it was re-proportioned so it size was more harmonious with the scale of the bottle
The “pocket flacon” devised to be carried in the purse was introduced in 1934. The price point and container size were developed to appeal to a broader customer base. It represented an aspirational purchase, to appease the desire for a taste of exclusivity in those who found the cost of the larger bottle prohibitive.
The bottle, over decades, has itself become an identifiable cultural artifact, so much so that Andy Warhol chose to commemorate its iconic status in the mid-1980s with his pop-art, silk-screen titled “Ads: Chanel.”
Creation and Fight for Control
In 1924, Chanel made an agreement with the Wertheimer brothers, Pierre and Paul, directors of the eminent perfume house Bourgeois since 1917, creating a corporate entity, “Parfums Chanel.” The Wertheimers agreed to provide full financing for production, marketing and distribution of Chanel No. 5. For ten percent of the stock, Chanel licensed her name to “Parfums Chanel” and removed herself from involvement in all business operations. Displeased with the arrangement, Chanel worked for more than twenty years to gain full control of “Parfums Chanel.”. She proclaimed that Pierre Wertheimer was “the bandit who screwed me.”
In particular during World War II, specifically the Nazi seizure of all Jewish owned property and business enterprises provided Chanel with the opportunity to gain the full monetary fortune generated by “Parfums Chanel” and its most profitable product, Chanel No. 5. The directors of “Parfums Chanel,” the Wertheimers, were Jewish, and Chanel used her position as an “Aryan” to petition German officials to legalize her right to sole ownership (during this time Chanel was having an affair with a German military intelligence officer Hans Günther von Dincklage ). On 5 May 1941, she wrote to the government administrator charged with ruling on the disposition of Jewish financial assets. Her grounds for proprietary ownership were based on the claim that “Parfums Chanel “is still the property of Jews”…and had been legally “abandoned” by the owners . “I have,” she wrote, “an indisputable right of priority…the profits that I have received from my creations since the foundation of this business…are disproportionate…[and] you can help to repair in part the prejudices I have suffered in the course of these seventeen years.” Chanel was not aware that the Wertheimers, anticipating the forthcoming Nazi mandates against Jews had, in May 1940, legally turned control of “Parfums Chanel” over to a Christian, French businessman and industrialist, Felix Amiot.
Ultimately, the Wertheimers and Chanel came to a mutual accommodation, re-negotiating the original 1924 contract. On 17 May 1947, Chanel received wartime profits of Chanel No. 5 in the amount of some nine million dollars in today’s money, and in the future her share would be two percent of all Chanel No. 5 sales worldwide. The financial benefit to her would be enormous. Her earnings would be in the vicinity of twenty-five million dollars a year, making her at the time one of the richest women in the world.
Advertising and marketing
1920s and 1930s
“Parfums Chanel,” was the corporate entity established in 1924 to run all aspects of the fragrance business, the production, marketing and distribution. Chanel felt it was time to liberate the sale of Chanel No. 5 from the restricted confines of her boutiques and release it to the world. The first target area was the United States, concentrating on New York City, the cultural and commercial center of America with the clientele for luxury goods. The inaugural marketing was discreet and deliberately restricted. The first ad appeared in The New York Times on December 16, 1924. It was a small print ad for “Parfums Chanel” announcing the Chanel line of fragrances now available at Bonwit Teller, an upscale department store. The ad was unremarkable, all the bottles appearing indistinguishable from one and other, displaying all the Chanel perfumes available, #9, #11, #22, and the centerpiece of the line, #5. This presentation of the product line was the extent of the advertising campaign in the 1920s and appeared only intermittently. In America, the sale of Chanel No. 5 was a word-of-mouth phenomenon, promoted from perfume counters at high-end department stores by enthusiastic sales staff. The strategy in Europe was no less restrained. The Galleries Lafayette, a notable department store, was the first retailer of the fragrance in Paris. In France itself, Chanel No. 5 was not advertised at all until the 1940s
The first real marketing blitz was planned for 1934-35. “The first truly solo advertisement of Chanel No. 5, as the most important Chanel perfume, comparable to her legend as a couturiere, ran in The New York Times on June 10, 1934”
1940s
In the early 1940s, when the industry trend was to increase brand exposure, “Parfums Chanel” took a contrary track and actually decreased advertising. In 1939 and 1940, ads had been significant. By 1941, they had been cut back dramatically so that there was almost no print advertising. The directors of “Parfums Chanel” may have felt the expenditure was not needed. Sales of fragrance had flourished during the years of World War II. Perfume sales in the United States from 1940-45 had increased tenfold, Chanel No. 5 flourished.
It was during the war years that the directors of “Parfums Chanel” came up with an innovative marketing idea. The intent to expand the sale to a middle-class customer had been instituted in 1934 with the introduction of the pocket flacon. The plan was now to extend the market by selling the perfume at military post exchanges, the PX. It was a risky move that may have hurt the exclusive status of the brand, but they went ahead and this marketing plan proved viable. It did not destroy the cachet of the brand, instead it came to epitomize a world of luxury and romance, a souvenir the soldier coveted for his sweetheart back home.
1970s and 1980s
During the 1960s the ads had diminished the allure of Chanel No. 5, identifying it with a scent for sweet, proper co-eds whose style bibles were teen-age fashion magazines. In the 1970s the brand name needed re-vitalization. For the first time in its long history it ran the risk of being labeled as mass market and passé. The fragrance was removed from drug stores and similar outlets. Outside advertising agencies were dropped. The remaking was re-imagined by Jacques Helleu, the artistic director for “Parfums Chanel.” Helleu chose French actress Catherine Deneuve for the new face of Chanel. The print ads showcased the iconic sculpture of the bottle. Television commercials were inventive mini-films with production values of surreal fantasy and seduction. Directed by Ridley Scott in the 1970s and 1980s, they “played on the same visual imagery, with the same silhouette of the bottle,” Under Helleu’s control the vision to return Chanel to the days of movie glamour and sophistication was realized.
The scent
Provenance of the “recipe”
The idea for the development of a distinctly modern fragrance had been on Chanel’s mind for some time when her lover, Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, introduced her to Ernest Beaux on the French Riviera in early 1920. Beaux was the master perfumer at A. Rallet and Company, where he had been employed since 1898. The company was the official perfumer to the Russian royal family, and “the imperial palace at St. Petersburg was a famously perfumed court.” The favorite scent of the Czarina Alexandra, composed specifically for her by Rallet in Moscow, had been an eau de cologne opulent with rose and jasmine named Rallet O-DE-KOLON No.1 Vesovoi.
In 1912, Beaux created a men’s eau de cologne, Le Bouquet de Napoleon, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Borodino, a decisive battle in the Napoleonic Wars. The success of this men’s fragrance inspired Beaux to create a feminine counterpart, whose jumping off point was the chemical composition of aldehydic multiflores in Hougibant’s immensely popular Quelque Fleurs (1912).
He experimented and manipulated the aldehydes in Quelque Fleurs, resulting in a fragrance he christened Le Bouquet de Catherine. The scent was intended to inaugurate another celebration in 1913, the 300th anniversary of the Romanoff dynasty. The debut of this new perfume proved ill-timed. World War I was approaching, and the czarina and the perfume’s namesake, the Empress Catherine, had both been German-born. A marketing misfortune that invoked unpopular associations, combined with the fact that Le Bouquet de Catherine was enormously expensive, made it a commercial failure. An attempt to re-brand the perfume, as Rallet No. 1 was unsuccessful, and the outbreak of World War I in 1914 effectively prevented public acceptance of the brand.
Beaux, who had affiliated himself with the Allies and the White Russian army, had spent 1917-19 as a lieutenant stationed far north, in the last arctic outpost of the continent, Arkangelsk, at Mudyug Island Prison where he interrogated Bolshevik prisoners. The polar ice, frigid seascape, and whiteness of the snowy terrain sparked his desire to capture the crisp fragrance of this landscape into a new perfume compound.
Beaux perfected what was to become Chanel No. 5 over several months in the late summer and autumn of 1920. He worked from the rose and jasmine base of Rallet No. 1. altering it to make it cleaner, more daring, reminiscent of the pristine polar freshness he had inhabited during his war years. He experimented with modern synthetics, adding his own invention “Rose E. B” and notes derived from a new jasmine source, a commercial ingredient called Jasophore. The revamped, complex formula also ramped up the quantities of orris-iris-root and natural musks.
The revolutionary key was Beaux’s use of aldehydes. Aldehydes are organic substances, carbon, oxygen and hydrogen. They are manipulated in the laboratory at crucial stages of chemical reaction whereby the process arrests and isolates the scent. When used creatively, aldehydes act as “seasonings,” an aroma booster. Beaux’s student, Constantin Weriguine, said the aldehyde Beaux used had the clean note of the arctic, “a melting winter note.” Legend has it that this wondrous concoction was the inadvertent result of a laboratory mishap. A laboratory assistant, mistaking a full strength mixture for a ten percent dilution, had jolted the compound with a dose of aldehyde in quantity never before used. Beaux prepared ten glass vials for Chanel’s inspection. Numbered 1-5 then 20-24, the gap presented the core May rose, jasmine and aldehydes in two complimentary series, each group a variation of the compound. “Number five. Yes,” Chanel said later, “that is what I was waiting for. A perfume like nothing else. A woman’s perfume, with the scent of a woman.”
This was the defining moment in the creation of Chanel No. 5, a new perfume redolent of past places, a fragrance concordance of Chanel’s childhood years at Aubazine, Grand Duke Dmitri’s royal court in czarist Russia and Beaux’s snowy, icy arctic.
