Chanel No. 5 was the first perfume launched by Coco Chanel, the only fashion designer who was listed on TIME magazine as one of the top 100 most influential people of the 20th century.
Known for her affairs with the rich, hatred for Jews, and admiration for Hitler, Coco Chanel lived a life full of controversies.
She came to Paris as the mistress of the textile baron Etienne Balsan and set up a designer hat boutique under his apartment.
By 1908, she began an affair with Balsan’s friend Arthur Capel, who tremendously influenced Coco Chanel (his clothing style inspired brand Chanel’s look).
Capel financed several of Chanel’s initial ventures, but by 1920 Chanel was a successful designer of clothing, hats, and accessories and owned a Rolls Royce, several boutiques, and a villa in France.
Now, she wanted to create a perfume that could describe the modern women she epitomised.
At the time, perfumes had two basic categories: single-garden flower perfumes for respectable women and heavy, musk, or jasmine fragrances for prostitutes or seductresses.
She wanted her perfume to appeal to the flapper (young women who disdained conventional societal norms, wore short skirts and make-up, smoked cigarettes, drank alcohol, etc.) and the liberated feminine spirit.
When she briefed her Russian perfumer, Ernest Beaux, she told him to create something artificial that made a “woman smell like a woman and not a flower bed.”
Perfumes in those days used to have one or two simple notes (the scent didn’t last long), and Chanel wanted to create a complicated composition that would last long.
Aldehydes (chemicals) had recently been isolated, and they could create lasting scents, but they were too powerful, and so perfumers were hesitant to use them.
Then, several months and many experiments later, Ernest Beaux presented to Coco Chanel ten perfume samples (numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 20, 21, 22, 23, 24).
Chanel picked number 5—it could be because she liked the perfume or just because it was Number 5 (she was believed to have a thing about number 5 and she launched most of her collections on the 5th day of the month).
Coco Chanel then invited Beaux and a few supposedly influential friends in an upmarket restaurant and sprayed Chanel No.5 around the table, and everyone was mesmerised by the fragrance.
Today, despite being 100-year old, this iconic perfume regularly features among the top perfumes for women, and a bottle of Chanel No. 5 is sold worldwide every 30 seconds.
