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Chanel had a fabulous taste for luxury: in the way she conducted her life, in clothes and hats she created, in jewelry, in furniture she surrounded herself with. But she was also known for her fabulous sense of smell and her love for perfume . "When man offers me a flower, I can smell the hands that picked them," she said.
"A woman who doesn't wear perfume has no future." These words of a French poet Paul Valery would become one of her preeminent slogans. She believed that the droplets of perfume applied behind the ear, on the back of a wrist and in the hollow of a shoulder, were a must for any elegant woman.
In the early 1920's Coco Chanel was not the only couturier to express interest in manufacture their own perfume. However, no one had ever dared to move away from the floral scents before Chanel. The smell of one flower was a widely base preference.
There are a lot of legends and mystery about the creation of Chanel number 5. Was number 5 genuinely her lucky number? Or was it the test sample number 5 that Coco had chosen and approved? No one knows it for sure any more. A lot of preeminent community people would claim that they had to do something with the embark on and success of number 5. The knowledge of creating mystery and success was a "know-how" of Chanel. What is even more important, she recognized the significance of manufacture people believe they were a part of it.
Ernest Beaux, the outstanding chemist and the owner of a laboratory in Grasse, and Coco Chanel, were a perfect firm match. Beaux was one of the first chemists to understand the significance of artificial scents. He was one of the first in the industry to speculate the significance of aldehydes. Chanel could also intuitionally understand the value of artificial scents.
"I want a perfume that is composed. It's a paradox. On a woman, a natural flower scent smells artificial. Maybe a natural perfume must be created artificially," she said.
Beaux is said to have been at first rather skeptical about her proposal to institute a perfume for her. Chanel made a tour of his premises, not missing a singular detail about the process of manufacture perfume. She succeeded in manufacture a deep impression on the chemist with her acute sense of smell and courage to advise discrete unbelievable combinations.
In the end Beaux industrialized several formulas for her. She tested them all, but prime the fifth. "That's what I expected. A perfume unlike any other ever made. A woman's perfume..."
Chanel's second great idea was to use a very straightforward square bottle - the idea sensational for the time of cupid and flower shaped bottles.
Coco Chanel was not prepared to such a scale of market success. It was more than she could handle, like a winning lottery ticket. The firm alliance with the brothers Pierre and Paul Wertheimer, the owners of Les Perfumeries Bourjois was made for the production and distribution of Chanel number 5.
This perfume remains the asset of the Wertheimer house to this day.
