The Chanel No 5 story

Neuilly, in the western outskirts of Paris, just at the point where Haussmann's Grands Boulevards give way to the glittering skyscrapers of La Defénse, may be smart, but it's not the most obvious home for a brand with the stature of Chanel. It is here, though, that the fragrance and beauty arm of that label resides, in a surprisingly unassuming bronze and glass structure boasting neither signage nor logo.

Inside, it is a rather different story. Entirely clad in black and beige, famously Mlle Chanel's chosen colours, from the cool marble floors and imposing pilasters to the simple but reassuringly expensive leather furniture, and even the two-tone uniform twin-sets of staff seated in reception, it is all quintessentially Chanel.

Take a lift to the penthouse, and it's all change once again, this time to a bright, predominantly white interior dominated by walls of window on all four sides, overlooking the rooftops of Paris, and flooded with diffuse, early autumn light. It is here that Chanel's master perfumer for 30 years, Jacques Polge, presides over his olfactory empire, which remains the most successful of its kind in the world.

Polge, only the third generation of in-house perfumers at Chanel, is not only guardian and curator of bestselling fragrances including Cristalle, No 19 and, most famous of all, No 5, he is also the creator of Coco, Coco Mademoiselle, Antaeus, Chance, Allure and, most recently, Les Exclusifs, a line available only in Chanel boutiques and featuring reissued scents first introduced by the grande dame herself, and all-new ones each inspired by and named after the minutiae of her well-documented life: 31 rue Cambon, for example, a modernised chypre, was the address of Chanel's first Paris home and boutique; 28 La Pausa is inspired by the house she had built on the Côte d'Azur, and its iris-filled garden.

"Would you like to see the lab?" wonders Polge, an elegant and sprightly man in his early sixties, known by his entourage simply as "le nez". Well, who wouldn't? This, after all, is where the alchemy that is the perfumer's art is performed, and where the impossibly luxurious components that go into the creation of some of the world's most extraordinary fragrances are housed in cabinets lining the walls and in a central rotating glass cylinder. There are hundreds of tiny, vivid-blue bottles – "Because blue is a beautiful colour, but also because it protects against the sun's rays," says Polge.

In this one, relatively small room, then, Chanel's most precious essences are preserved, and new formulas developed. Polge is not unreasonably proud of the place (which is perhaps best described – whisper it – as reminiscent of Doctor Who's Tardis, albeit an unusually big-budget version).

Today, the positively uplifting scent of orange zest fills the air. "Quite possibly," Polge says, somewhat conspiratorially. We are here today to talk about Eau Première, the first new concentration of Chanel No 5 to be released on to the market for over 20 years. Given that around 600 new fragrances are introduced annually, that makes it quite an event in itself. Like its magnificent antecedent – and Chanel No 5, first given to the world in 1921, is still among the most complex and, indeed, modern fragrances ever created – it comes in a rectangular bottle stamped with simple black lettering, though it is longer and leaner, and the perfume is almost clear rather than the original's amber.

Unlike many other great scents, the original Chanel No 5 has never been reinterpreted for a supposedly more contemporary audience. For all those who love it – it is estimated that a bottle is sold every 55 seconds somewhere in the world – great pains are taken to ensure that it smells just as it did when launched, which is no mean feat. However, new interpretations of the scent are introduced – the last of these, also courtesy of Polge, was Eau de Parfum back in the 1980s.

"For us, you know, Chanel No 5 never needed to be revamped," Polge explains, refusing, with some diplomacy, to be drawn on the 2003 reworking of Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche, to name just one, which left its core audience bewildered, even bereft. (Paco Rabanne's Eau de Calandre, still available, is now considered to be a closer approximation of the original Rive Gauche.) Before Polge arrived at Chanel, he was, coincidentally, co-creator of Rive Gauche. This, of course, was the most emblematic scent of the 1970s, in much the same way as the rather less successful Obsession by Calvin Klein dominated the Eighties.

Chanel No 5, though, has stood the test of time far better than either of these. "No 5 has always been a very alive perfume in the company," Polge continues. "It is our job to protect the creation, and we make all types of effort in order that it remains the same. Every time there is a change in fashion or in women's habits of using perfume, instead of altering what already exists, we launch a new product. First came Eau de Toilette, then there was Eau de Parfum, and very soon there will be Eau Première."

The latest addition to the Chanel No 5 family of fragrances is fresher and perhaps more gentle than its majestic forebear, making it more in line with current, lighter trends in perfumery. "The history is very simple," says Polge. "Eau Première is for all those women who came to me and said, 'No 5 is fantastic but it's not for me'. Eau Premiere is lighter, more transparent, but, in essence, it is still No 5.

"Before the last war," he continues, "we knew, perhaps, of only six constituents of jasmine [among No 5's principle ingredients], but now we know more than 200. In Eau Première, I used many ingredients that did not exist when the original was created. I think, though maybe I'm wrong, that if Monsieur Beaux created No 5 now, he would have used them, too.

As perhaps befits the world's most legendary fragrance, the truth and mythology surrounding the creation of Chanel No 5 are entangled. It is believed that Gabrielle ("Coco") Chanel was introduced to Ernest Beaux, perfumer to the Russian court, by her lover, the Grand Duke Dmitri Romanov, who escaped revolutionary Russia with the chemist to settle in Biarritz in 1920. Until that point, the milliner-turned-couturier had demonstrated no interest in perfume whatsoever – she viewed is as superficial if not distasteful, aimed primarily at the none-too-romantic pursuit of masking the odour of unwashed bodies.

Just as Mlle Chanel's desire was to give women a stylish and contemporary uncluttered wardrobe that was a million miles away from the furbelows and frills of the belle époque, so she aimed to revolutionise perfume. The scents that came before Chanel No 5 were heavy single-note florals, packaged in, to her pioneering mind, overdecorated bottles that did little, if anything, to advertise the importance of the juice within.

"The perfumes that were around before No 5 related precisely to specific flowers," Polge explains. "There was jasmine, rose, gardenia, lily of the valley... For me, No 5 was the first perfume that used flowers – lots of flowers – but that didn't immediately relate to one in particular."

In other words, Chanel No 5 was the world's first abstract fragrance, as signposted by its very name, a number – Chanel's lucky number according to folklore – rather than anything more obviously feminine or even just evocative. Chanel herself, ever the adept marketer, put it neatly. She wanted, she told Beaux when she first commissioned him, "un parfum de femme, à odeur de femme".

"Chanel never answered a question directly," says Polge. "And that is not only very clever but also appropriate to perfume, which is a poetic way of saying something using neither images nor words. What I think she meant by that was the idea that the perfume smells different on different women, that a woman's natural perfume informs the fragrance she wears. Although people may believe otherwise, there are actually very few fragrances that do that."

The secret to No 5's intentionally elusive nature, and to the fact that, almost 90 years after its inception, it remains almost impossible to pin down is, in fact, scientific more than poetic. This was the first fragrance to make use of synthetically replicated molecules taken from products of natural origin called aldehydes. To explain the nature of aldehydes is a complex business, and one perhaps best left to chemists. Put briefly, though, they run the gamut from repellent – formaldehyde, for example, which smells aggressively cloying and is used to preserve cadavers – to infinitely desirable – powdery, effervescent and pure.

The first aldehydes were synthesised in a laboratory in France in the late 19th century, but it wasn't until Beaux started working with them that they were stabilised for use in perfume. And the fruits of his endeavour are still contained within Chanel No 5.

While Mlle Chanel had no problem with the use of synthetics – she famously, for example, mixed costume jewellery with the real thing, considering that to be a signifier of modernity – today we react badly to the introduction of chemicals to any product, from fragrance to food, erroneously believing that they are a cheap and allergenic substitute for the real thing. Often, however, just the opposite is the case.

As Polge himself puts it: "People don't understand the word 'synthetic'. Usually, any so-called synthetic product has its roots in a natural product. Taking an ingredient that is a very tiny part of the natural product and synthesising it allows us to give nuances that we couldn't before. More importantly, there are natural products that don't smell good and are cheap, like citronella [used to repel insects and bring dogs into line] and lemon grass [the staple ingredient of often foul-smelling detergents]. Then there are synthetic products that smell very good and are extremely expensive."

One such product is the aldehyde C10. Polge offers a drop of it to me on a paper stick, and the aforementioned aroma of oranges that smell better than even nature intended is immediately apparent. A second stick is more peculiar and difficult to identify, though still bizarrely appealing. "It smells clean," I say. "Clean is an important word," replies Polge charitably, before adding: "It smells like the steam rising from a cotton shirt that is being ironed." And that, of course, is precisely what it smells like, and demonstrates, perhaps, why a nose is a nose in the first place, and the rest of us are mere amateurs by comparison.

Whatever, the single quality that aldehydes share – and in this C10 is the exception that proves the rule – is that they smell extremely unfamiliar. And it is just the "clean" mix of aldehydes in question that is the secret of Chanel No 5.

"Beaux used the best materials he had at his disposal at the time," says Polge, "but he said that the impression was that there was too much at the bottom of the bottle and that it lacked lift." The effect of aldehydes, Polge's eminent predecessor went on to claim, was like that of "lemon juice on strawberries" – they add sparkle to the main ingredient, enhancing any natural properties, and bringing them to life. The "strawberries" in Chanel No 5 are principally rose and jasmine, and in the preservation of these, two of the most expensive ingredients of perfumery both traditional and modern, the house of Chanel is also unrivalled. In 1987, true to its intention to stay true to the character of its original scent, Chanel signed a contract with the Mul family in Grasse, who now work exclusively for the company producing the finest flowers of their kind.

"In 1921, if you wanted rose or jasmine, the only place you could find it was Grasse," Polge says – he grew up in the South of France and holidayed in Grasse, so remembers the smell of intense flower production well. "For many reasons, though, and principally as a result of the pursuit of cheap labour, that is no longer the case. First, production went to Calabria in southern Italy, then to Egypt, to North Africa, and finally to India. It's not necessarily worse jasmine, but it is different. In order to keep the perfume as it should be, we signed a contract with the biggest producer in Grasse. Later, we did the same for rose."

This shrewd move makes Chanel look good, for sure, not only keeping the French tradition of flower cultivation for fragrance alive, but also ensuring that No 5, and Parfum No 5, the original and most exclusive concentration in particular, remains exactly the same.

"When I joined the company," Polge says, "the production of both rose and jasmine was decreasing, year by year, to the point that we were worried that soon we wouldn't have enough. By working directly with the producers, we couldn't turn the clocks back to increase the production to what it once was, but we did stop its decline."

If this much time and effort is involved in ensuring that Chanel No 5 is the most enduringly successful fragrance in history, there is, of course, more to its spectacular longevity than the juice itself. The Chanel No 5 bottle, altered only minimally since first designed by Coco Chanel herself, is by now as recognisable a part of contemporary culture as Coca-Cola. Small wonder, then, that back in the 1950s, Andy Warhol captured its transparent beauty in myriad colourways. For its part, Chanel, never a company to miss a trick, not only reproduced the work for a limited-edition run of packaging way back when, but also later created its own ad campaign inspired by Warhol's original.

Then, of course, there are the many "faces" of No 5. The original of these was Chanel herself, photographed with perhaps her greatest, and certainly most lucrative, creation in her Paris apartment by Man Ray. Although Marilyn Monroe was never actually signed up by Chanel, she helped to establish No 5's allure, famously declaring that "a few drops of No 5" was the only thing she wore in bed. Since that time, some of the world's most beautiful women have represented the fragrance, including the French actresses Catherine Deneuve (a brave choice at the time given that she was barely known outside Europe, and America was, and still is, the biggest market for luxury fragrance), and Carole Bouquet. More recently, Nicole Kidman became the first Hollywood superstar to promote No 5 in a film and stills captured by the Moulin Rouge! director Baz Luhrmann. From next year, Audrey Tautou, currently filming the lead in Coco and Igor, documenting the love affair between Chanel and Stravinsky, will assume the mantle.

In the end, though, no amount of marketing can justify the unparalleled supremacy of this fragrance, which, as Polge puts it, is ultimately attributable to the fact that "it smells good".

So, what exactly does Chanel No 5 smell like?According to Luca Turin, author of The Secret of Scent and, with Tania Sanchez, the recently published Perfumes – The Guide, notable for its plain-spoken style and even, by beauty-industry standards, plain rudeness, No 5 smells as follows:

"Those who have been brought up on stunted, suburban fragrances must find it hard to accept the existence of such a regally beautiful thing," he writes. "The top notes surprise every time: a radiant chorus of ylang and rose floating like gold leaf on the chalk-white background of aldehydes. Curiously, this most modern of perfumes evokes an image of great antiquity, perhaps a Scythian jewel on a white dress.

"The drydown fades the way white flowers do, slowly becoming soft and flesh-coloured. And to get an idea of No 5's quality, smell it on a paper strip after 24 hours. Now try this with whatever else you're wearing. See?"

And here's the similarly discerning – and brilliant – New York Times perfume critic, Chandler Burr, on the subject. "Chanel No 5 hits you like a bank of white-hot searchlights washing the powdered stars at a movie premiere in Cannes on a dry summer night. If you haven't smelled it in a while, do so again. It's great to bathe in that light."

In A Year Inside the Perfume Industry, a study of olfactory life in France and the US, Burr states that Chanel's competitors are "exquisitely conscious of the perfume referred to by some in the industry as the monster – le monstre – Chanel's No 5. Here is a 90-year-old fragrance, always at the top of the international bestseller lists, an institution whose 2003 sales [were] an astonishing €180m."

Back in Jacques Polge's laboratory, a comparatively understated place given the scale of the treasures it holds, "le nez" appears happy to indulge my curiosity.

"When Chanel No 5 was first created," he says, "it was very influential and many imitations were created, but those have now all disappeared, which means that No 5 seems more different than ever. I think that today, No 5 really is unique, and that is the most important thing, to create something that is unique.

If there is one word I would use to describe it, it would be 'mystery'. It's a very mysterious fragrance, and that is a fine quality. A fragrance that lacks mystery is too obvious, it can never last very long."

If Chanel No 5 were a book, I ask him, what would it be? "Les Liaisons dangereuses," he replies.

And a painting? "It makes me think of Titian," he says. "Venice was very important to Chanel."

And a film? "François Truffaut's Baisés Volés."

And a piece of music? "Mozart's Concerto for Clarinet," Polge says, barely pausing for thought.

Finally, I wonder, if Chanel No 5 were an animal, what would it be?

"That's easy. It would be a lion."

And that lion continues to roar.