We Celebrate 100 Years of Chanel No 5! ~ Fragrantica

BY ELENA KNEZEVIC

Chanel No 5 was my first real perfume. I bought it when I was eighteen because I wanted to have the most famous perfume. I could afford a mini bottle of 5ml with eau de toilette. I loved it before I even smelled it because I loved the rumors and stories, the beautiful women who advertised it, the bottle, the stopper, and even the price I couldn’t afford because The Perfume had to be expensive. With this readiness to fall in love with the perfume, the fragrance itself wasn’t that important. I was about to have 5ml of a legend, and I was ready to appreciate anything, but I loved its one-of-a-kind fragrance I couldn’t even describe. I love it still. It hasn’t changed since then, and I don’t care about better vintage versions of Chanel No 5, because it isn’t about the fragrance for me.

BY JOHN BIEBEL

There are so many stories that surround Chanel No 5 that I feel it’s apt to add our own personal ones to the legendary ones that are already there in the public consciousness. Many of us associate the famous fragrance with people in our lives, and I’m no different. For my mother, Chanel No 5 was one of a handful of perfumes that represented beauty, escape, fantasy — a small spoonful of elegance that lifted her away from a world that wasn’t particularly easy for her when she was a young woman. Her first bottle of Chanel No 5 was an eau de toilette that she received as a factory second because the sprayer didn’t work exactly right — she worked at this same factory for a short while. You can imagine what a treasure this was for her, in earlier days when perfumes were far harder to obtain, and were treated with such reverence.

It was quite meaningful to buy my mother perfume when I was older and making money of my own. Buying her a new bottle of Chanel No 5 was an occasion met with many smiles and memories. It holds just as many memories for me now. I wonder how many of us thrilled a bit inside when we walked into a department store, smelled this magical fragrance of rose, ylang-ylang, iris, lily-of-the-valley, aldehyde and oakmoss? Did we enjoy it as much as the people we gave it to? I earnestly believe so. I recall with crystalline precision the feeling of cold air around Christmas, holding a thick card sprayed with Chanel No 5 in my overcoat pocket, walking with a shopping bag in hand and feeling that everything looked a bit brighter. Maybe this is the same sensation that my mother felt when she could indulge in perfume during long work days. For so many of us, we still feel the unmistakable thrill of expectation that Chanel No 5 summons to our senses. It is a perfume of the future, the next day, when things will improve and all will be right with the world.

BY SOFIA SHANG

Remember when we were young and our parents might’ve tried to share something with us but we never listened? Only to find out one day we were in the midst of discovering that very thing by our own willingness and loving it? It is the case with Chanel No 5 and me. I vividly remember that my father brought home a bottle of No 5 EDP among many other duty-free shop souvenirs from a business trip, and he failed to convince me to take the perfume. Then some magical combination happened a few years later! It includes digging into the life of a popular Chinese and English novelist, Eileen Chang (张爱玲), and stumbling upon the legendary story of her leaving a bottle of Chanel No 5 to her University of California research assistant to say ‘Thank you’; discovering Fragrantica in 2007 when curious about perfume notes; and seeing a Chanel miniature parfum set (including No 5, No 19, Coco, Coco Mademoiselle, and Allure) for the holiday season.

Then voilà! I was ready and more than just eager to welcome my first ever bottles of Chanel into my life. I was just starting to fall down the perfumista rabbit hole back then, and was already lost at sea in the department stores permeated with various floral-fruity-shampoo-y scents. No 5’s bright aldehyde and its sandalwood, animalic soapy scent is like a classic violin instantly smashing autotuned pop music. A juxtaposition of intellectually stimulating and comforting, No 5 has been shining like a lighthouse in the perfumed sea to me. It has an allure of encouraging you to get close to discover, to venture away to explore, and always reassuring you with its classic elegance that there’s a certain kind of comfort and style you can fall back to.

BY ITALO PEREIRA

My experience with Chanel No 5 comes from a passion that has nothing to do with perfumery, but with cinema. I’ve always loved classy cinema from the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Between Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Elizabeth Taylor, and Marilyn Monroe, Marilyn always attracted me not for her acting but for her beauty and sensuality. During my life, I always wanted to know more about Marilyn and I looked for everything related to her behavior and tastes in movies, magazines, reports, interviews and biographies. Until I came across the declaration that she only used a few drops of Chanel No 5 before going to bed and that was it.

I found that amazing. I already knew the perfume, but I had never classified it as a lewd or sensual perfume. I thought of it as a great French perfume and nothing more. After this statement, I started looking for the whole story behind the construction of Chanel No 5, and I could see that the biggest intention of the perfume was to smell the woman, to be abstractly floral and sexy without being obvious, using what was most expensive and modern at the time to reach this formula of luxury and glamour. From then on, I never lacked a bottle of Chanel No 5 in the collection and none of its versions.

BY ELENA VOSNAKI

They say Chanel No 5 is the ultimate classic and they know a thing or two when they say it. Even though reportedly — and I can vouch for this in my private consultations — it does very poorly in blind tests, it is nothing short of a legend, and the care that Chanel took to preserve its myth is testament to the pedestal on which it’s placed by the industry: le monstre sacré, like they say about opera singers. And No 5 is definitely operatic, especially in the current Eau de Parfum version, which was introduced in the decade of excess, in the 1980s.

Thankfully, my own experience as a teenager was tied to the lighter Eau de Toilette. It was my aunt that gave it to me, as a gift for my birthday when I was in high school, studying French and classical piano. Maybe that connection was not lost on her, since this classical perfume is considered the ne plus ultra of French sophistication. Or maybe it was what she actually said while offering it to me, “Every girl alive should own it at some point.” I was very young and hadn’t quite grasped the meaning of her words. It implied a sense of history, of heritage too, of sharing secret knowledge, of a rite of passage. It stuck with me, that line. The musky embrace and the narcotic floralcy of the ylang in its scent was what got to me when wearing it — that clean and sensuous aura of it. It opened up a vista of possibilities, as I was enamoured with perfumes even then, although more invested in the “in” fragrances of my own era. It allowed me the porthole through which I could scavenge vintages and older glamorous fragrant monuments, well before retro came into fashion. I’m grateful to her, and to her insight into Chanel No 5. Although it’s not my go-to fragrance, I always keep several bottles of different iterations in my perfume cabinet for when I want to feel like I’m part of history, too. Long may it live!

Photos of 100th anniversary editions by Elena Knezevic

MORE ABOUT CHANEL No 5:

Chanel No 5: Ask For The Moon – Holiday Editions 2021

CHANEL No 5: Contemporary History in Faces – Chanel No 5 Movies from the perspective of an actor and an artistic director

Chanel No 5: What Makes It What It Is? – A chemist’s point of view

Chanel No 5 – EVOLUTION OF THE BOTTLE – How the Chanel No 5 bottle changed through the years

5 INTERPRETATIONS OF Chanel No 5 – The five versions of Chanel No 5 that the brand produces now

Chanel No 5 and No 5 L’Eau: A Breakthough – The lightest interpretation of No 5

FAMOUS FACES OF CHANEL No 5:

Marilyn Monroe, Bob Beerman, 1953

Ali MacGraw photographed by Jérome Ducrot
for CHANEL N°5 advertising campaign in 1966

Lauren Hutton photographed
by Richard Avedon for CHANEL N°5 advertising campaign in 1968.
Courtesy The Richard Avedon Foundation

Catherine Deneuve photographed by Richard Avedon
for the advertising campaign N°5 of CHANEL in 1972, USA

Carole Bouquet photographed by Michel Comte
for the advertising campaign N°5 of CHANEL, 1987

Nicole Kidman photographed by Patrick Demarchelier
for the advertising campaign N°5 of CHANEL, 2006

Marion Cotillard photographed by Steven Meisel
for the advertising campaign N°5 of CHANEL, 2020

Ad pictures: Chanel press information